Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Perry Mason was taking notes

So here's Judy Woodruff of PBS sounding for all the world like a writer for Raw Story, or a regular on George Conway's Twitter feed. And she didn't stop there:
Which, in a nutshell, tells you how the day went for Mitch McConnell.

I know the pundits and the people Raw Story will find to write articles about (and I do like those articles) will talk about how badly this is going for McConnell.  It may be McConnell agrees; it may be he thinks today doesn't matter.  But McConnell started the day with rules that would require the Senate to be in session for 24 hours of the next 48, without access to anything stronger than water or milk (I'm not making this up).  He backed off of that almost the moment the Senators were sworn in.  Then Sen. Schumer started putting motions on the floor to require evidence be presented.  McConnell wanted to reject this on the flimsy premise that it was premature:  arguments first, evidence afterwards, if at all.  Some Senators even wanted to argue, as Cippolone and Sekulow did, that the House isn't entitled to evidence since it doesn't bring any from their own hearings.  Well, they were going to be barred from bringing any; McConnell had to back away from that obvious attempt to stop the trial before it started, too.

Still, McConnell started the day as the "Dark Master" of the Senate chamber, and made it clear late in the afternoon as the third round of arguments started on Schumer's third motion to get a subpoena issued for documents, that he was going to table the motion, so why go through the motions?  Except he couldn't shut down debate, and the House Managers played Sekulow and Cippolone like a five piece band.

Like this:
Or this:
I listened to as much of it as I could. The House Managers batted Trump's lawyers around like a cat playing with a mouse. They kept trying to debate process, and House Managers kept putting on their case.  I've watched a lot of "Perry Mason" re-runs recently.  Perry regularly uses a preliminary hearing, where the only burden on the prosecution is to present enough evidence to have the defendant bound over for trial.  Usually the defense tries to get as much of the prosecution case as possible, but once the prosecution has made a prima facie showing, the hearing ends.  For Perry Mason, such a hearing is usually where he finds out who the real murderer is, through skillful cross-examination of as many witnesses as he can get the judge to let him call.  Until this trial I always thought that was a fanciful fictional caprice that couldn't possibly occur in the real world; but Adam Schiff and the other House Managers have been Perry Mason to Cippolone and Sekulow's Hamilton Burger.  And as Perry perries the thrusts of the opposition and works like a stonemason to build a solid wall of a case, so also does he make hamburger of Hamilton Burger.  The House Managers are making out more like Perry Mason than I ever thought possible in real life.
This is a strategy:

Does this mean they win?  Well, not in the Senate, of course.  In the court of public opinion, however, Mitch McConnell has been run over and the truck backed up and forward over him again.  The only way today could have gone worse for him and Trump is if Democrats controlled the Senate, too.
Yeah; pretty much like that.
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