where the makeup of parliament is not an immediate concern, Republican maneuvers Thursday meant that the vote on the articles of impeachment for Donald Trump rather than occurring yesterday afternoon, in time for the evening news cycle, will occur today.
Speculation abounds, but it appeared that GOP objections and actions were designed to push the vote late into the night with the corresponding result that it would hit the news for most people this morning, when they were otherwise concerned about work and the day, and therefore make less of a splash. Chairman Jerry Nadler was apparently having none of it and gaveled the hearing down, meaning the vote will occur today.
A lot of the political maneuvers and spectacle surrounding the impeachment proceedings has been a feature of routine politics, old fashioned politics, and aiming for the media fence on the part of both sides. It hasn't been pretty. Never content with the normal opening and closing statement that should be routine, the hearings have featured daily openings in which, at least in the intelligence committee, featured a Democratic Congressman who presents as an absolute pompous ass v. a GOP Congressman who didn't seem to quite know what the real issues are. Everyone looks horrible. Indeed, it makes a person nostalgic for hearings as presented in The Godfather or The Aviator, which were supposed to show defeated proceedings but which look so much more adult. In truth, they've probably always been this juvenile but we didn't get a front row seat until recently. Having said that, the chance for Congressmen to imagine that they're making points at home with their declarations means that the temptation to drone on while pretending to be Roman Senator from a 1960s vintage movie or a jacketless Teamster is just too strong for some.
So the vote will come today.
Having said that, savvy press folks take the view that the best time for a story to break is a Friday, as people want to get home and quit thinking about the hard week behind them. Many people never read a Saturday newspaper and if they do, they read the sports page so they can see what their teams are doing that day and tomorrow. Others check the local events. Political circus isn't on most people's minds.
Particularly when it appears that most people have their minds made up already. So the maneuver may prove to be wise indeed. The hearing will end with a whimper and it looks like it'll never get much beyond a motion to dismiss in the Senate. We'll hear about the whole thing all next year as Democrats try to use what occurred to whip up support for their Presidential candidates and the President uses it to accuse the Democrats of doing nothing the past four years except look for ways to remove him. Frankly the Democrats are pretty vulnerable to such accusations now that this is set to fail. Nancy Pelosi's early instincts in this area will prove to be correct. Nobody who is not in one camp or the other is going to be deeply moved by these results, and those strongly in either camp will see the entire matters as vindicating the views they already held.
And one of those views is that Congress has done pretty much nothing over the past four years. That's not completely correct, and indeed the House passed a major trade bill this past week. The Senate, in fact, has been making a record number of Court appointments and that fact, little notice,d means that the Federal bench has been more impacted since any time since Jimmy Carter's administration, when the Carter appointments reformed a left leaning bench into a solidly left leaning bench. Now it'll be a solidly conservative bench. The result of that will be that many topics now decided by courts rather than legislatures will have to be done the other way around, with the national legislature having to really actually work for the first time in over a decade.
If it can find its way around to doing that.
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