The Scholars

I didn't hear any of the Constitutional scholars testify in front of the Judiciary Committee yesterday, as I was practicing law instead, but I would have liked to.

Fortunately, you can find transcripts that are done and this blog does it everyday.

Maybe I'll get time to read some.

In order to really know what they have to say, you really have to actually hear it or read it.  Otherwise, all you will get a is a news snipped and pundit commentary, neither of which is fully accurate or important. As an example of the latter, the news was all about how one scholar said something about Trump's 13 year old son (I don't know what), and the First Lady replied by Twitter (with I don't know what), and the scholar apologized. Whatever the deal was, it doesn't really matter.

If you are like most people, and don't have an occupation where you can watch impeachment testimony all day, NPR's Politics blog summarized the first day's hearings and I'm sure will summarize them all.  Basically, their take was that the first three witnesses, the Democratic witnesses, all testified on the history the impeachment provision and were of the opinion that President Trump's actions were impeachable offenses. The fourth witness, the Republican witness, had perhaps the most interesting testimony, apparently, as he agrees that the President's conduct was reprehensible, but he feels that the bar for impeachment is much higher and there were no impeachable offenses.  Apparently he did feel that President Nixon's conduct in helping to cover up the Watergate break ins would have been impeachable, and that President Clinton's actions in "lying about sex" was also.  I disagree in regard to Clinton's actions, but I'd tend to agree regarding Trump's actions. The proper bar, it seems to  me, should be quite high.