As ever, the power to correct this lies with the voters, and the question is: will they give a shit?Your reminder that while Trump's lawyers are behaving ridiculously, Republican senators are poised to behave disgracefully.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 10, 2021
There is no answer to that question prior to 2022. But evidence presented to the nation in the well of the Senate this week may well win hearts and minds. Just one video and opening arguments in the Senate yesterday decked Trump's lawyers (I use the term loosely: Schoen was no better than Castor; he only looked better in contrast. I listened to Schoen: he said the same thing over and over and over and over again, clearly trying to use all his time, but clearly having nothing really to argue beyond one point. In a courtroom, or (more comparatively) an appellate proceeding, he'd have been shut down by the judge. No chance of that in the Senate, but Schoen/Castor went on to lose on GOP vote, so....) so badly they never recovered. And now Trump has hired two new lawyers.
On top of this, Republican Senators are going to make half-assed arguments like "Democrats were glorifying violence!", which I don't think even FoxNews will champion (OAN and Newsmax are another matter). I don't think many Americans found the assault on the Capitol to be a high-point of U.S. history or the history of government in America. The more GOP officeholders are forced to justify their defense, or just their indifference, to what happened on January 6th, the better.
If, in the end, the voters don't give a wet snap about that, there's nothing to be done. Except revive Paul Simon's "American Tune." He wrote that in the aftermath of Watergate. It's even more prescient and applicable now.
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