Are you new to politics?
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Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!
Obviously Mitch can do whatever he wants. I meant procedural wise. He can’t stop the House from impeaching. That’s why I asked.
From Wikipedia:
The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
Clause Six grants to the Senate the sole power to try impeachments and spells out the basic procedures for impeachment trials. The Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to mean that the Senate has exclusive and unreviewable authority to determine what constitutes an adequate impeachment trial. Of the nineteen federal officials formally impeached by the House of Representatives, eleven were acquitted and seven were convicted by the Senate. On one occasion (in the case of Senator William Blount) the Senate declined to hold a trial, asserting that it had no jurisdiction over its own members.
So the Senate has an unreviewable power to hold impeachment trials according to the Supreme Court but so far has only declined to use said power once because the person being impeached was a Senator. Moscow Mitch has already been briefing Senators on how long the trial will take so I think his hands are pretty much tied on holding the trial, although how seriously they take their Oath of Affirmation is up for debate.
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This is just a partial analysis of Fiona Hill’s deposition because it’s 440 pages, and I really need to read Taylor’s before tomorrow. I’m about 300 pages into her deposition, and it’s interesting. Here are some highlights:
- She is angry about a lot of things, but especially related to Yovanovitch.
- It is also pretty clear she can’t stand Sondland.
- She does try to create distance for the president.
- She gets heated frequently in the deposition apparently with GOP lawyers. At one point, the lawyer says to her when going back to a hot topic, ‘please don’t jump down my throat on this’, before asking the question.
- She said that Sondland said he spoke to the president a lot, but she doesn’t really believe him. She feels that it’s possible most of his interactions were with Mulvaney. Now how she somehow thinks Mulvaney is acting on his own, I don’t know.
- She has nothing good to say about Giuliani.
- She also makes it very clear without prompting that she is not ‘Anonymous’, and that she had been relentlessly pressed whether it was her.
- She said it’s stupid to go down rabbit holes related to the 2016 election, when it was all Russia.
- She unequivocally states that the phone call is awful and that she got exactly what it meant, especially with the previous context she had. Volker’s testimony was that he didn’t have the context until the rough transcript came out, and he thought it was bad once he understood context. He still played dumb over it.
- Hill does try to give justification for some of the things that happened, but says that it was still unusual for a hold to be put on with no reason why (she said holds happen all the time for various reasons).
- For some reason, she tries to make it really clear that she witnessed no wrongdoing by Perry (who was implicated in corruption by an AP story yesterday), despite him being in these meetings in question (I have no idea if he was on the call, and Hill was not).
The biggest thing from a procedure standpoint was remember that dumb stunt Gaetz pulled prior to Laura Cooper’s deposition of storming the SCIF? Well, that asshole absolutely knew he wasn’t allowed to be there. At Hill’s hearing, Gaetz tried to sit in. Schiff told him to get out, because he wasn’t on a relevant committee. He actually said, ‘absent yourself’ (lol). Gaetz wouldn’t leave, and said, ‘are you going to have me thrown out?’. Schiff said that Gaetz would leave on his own.
Gaetz felt that because he was on the Judiciary Committee that he was entitled to be there, and tried to make a spectacle. So, they went to the rules parliamentarian by phone. The parliamentarian said Gaetz wasn’t allowed to be there, and Gaetz left without further incident. It wasted about 45 minutes from start to finish. So they actually went through a rules description of who was allowed to be in these depositions with the parliamentarian, Gaetz left after that ruling, and then did his dumb stunt probably about 10 days later. What an idiot.
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Here’s the impeachment TV watching guide:
Are Taylor and Kent going to be at the same table, or something?
Ahh… Maybe… Hopefully these staff members have it all coordinated. 
Based on the schedule, it would mean Kent would start at 4:30pm if they were separate and I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.
I hope they appear separately, as I’m not available till around 3/4 tomorrow
That transcript place that did the Maguire hearing is awesome, so I’m figuring a transcript with video will probably be available not long after 24 hours after the hearing. Your timing is about right (I think you’re 8 hours ahead) for when the hearing starts. It’s at 10am ET, so you might not miss that much.
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Hopefully Dems are smart enough to save the good stuff for the evening, and to leave recesses at optimal times for the news networks to summarize the important stuff. Most Americans are giving this <15 minutes per day. You better make sure you hit some important stuff for most of them.
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If you read the transcripts, you’d know this is slam dunk stuff with A+ witnesses. Everything that was said in that will be brought up here. There will be big things throughout. The last thing you want to do is save the good stuff till the the end.
I’ll give you an equivalent. A TV show has a pilot. Your job is to pull the person in right away and keep them there. If you say, well let me hold it for a great cliffhanger, you might not have an audience by the time your great cliffhanger happens. Good plot starts you hot, keeps you hot, and ends hot. This whole testimony tomorrow depending on how it’s run will be hot, and the GOP won’t even get on the record other than an opening statement for nearly the first hour.
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I didn’t need to read the transcripts to know that this is the case, nor did I need to read them to know it won’t matter in and of itself. What will matter is crafting a message to the public and getting it to them.
Just like I didn’t need to read the whole Mueller report to know that it was a roadmap for impeachment and laid out the collusion. Nor did I need to read it to know whether or not it would matter.
I’m going to stop you right there. The pilot isn’t airing at 10am on a Wednesday.
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I’ll stop you right there, it doesn’t matter that it’s airing at 10am. Mueller’s testimony crushed in the ratings for daytime TV. It beat nearly everything in primetime that week, but the news networks called it a dud. You don’t know what you’re talking about, and neither do they.
TVs are on everywhere on news channels all day, and they’ll all have it on in the background. There will be huge revelation after huge revelation (to those who haven’t read the transcripts) that will be able to be distilled into sound bites. I have no idea why you think that won’t be the case.
Nunn Knows Best, that’s why the Mueller testimony lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment and conviction!
It might be the case, it might not. It depends on how good of a job the Dems do strategically.