Good Germans

Republicans are nothing if not "good Germans." They know how to follow orders. When they get their ludicrous talking points, they know how to stick with them. Yesterday, Stupid Watergate found its John Dean in Ambassador Bill Taylor, who told us what we already know, but did so with a level of detail that makes a lot of Trump's prefered defenses crumble.

Since the President's conduct has become less and less defensible, Republicans are falling back on a bullshit process argument.  Their argument seems to be...well, I think it is simply to repeat the word process over and over again for Fox News cultists.  This will eventually leak into your Facebook feeds, so get ready for it.

Their argument, if we can dignify it with that term, is that Trump hasn't had a chance to defend himself, and that most of testimony is behind closed doors.  Of course, what we are seeing now is effectively the Grand Jury phase, where prosecutors meet behind those closed doors and present evidence.  Eventually, they will present this evidence to the House and the President can defend himself in the Senate.  That's the process, and it's completely normal to the degree that anything is normal about this.  In fact, unlike a Grand Jury, Trump has people inside the room seeing the evidence against him.

We also have a novel argument being advanced by Matt Whitaker, toilet salesman for people who large genitalia and former acting AG.  His argument was that "abuse of power was not a crime."  This goes back to the argument that there is no crime called "collusion" but rather conspiracy.  Of course, while Trump HAS committed crimes in the Ukraine scandal (campaign finance crimes especially, emoluments more generally), abuse of power is not listed in the US criminal code.  As counterargument: who cares? Abuse of power is EXACTLY what impeachment is for.

The target date for wrapping up the impeachment process was Thanksgiving.  This was likely done to prevent the Senate trial from bleeding over into an election year. If the next month is as bad for the president and the GOP as this past month has been, I don't know how much longer they can keep moving the goalposts to protect him.