It almost certainly will amount at times to a mockery. The question is which side will be seen as mostly making that mockery.
The stakes on that seem higher for the Democrats.
The House Judiciary Committee will begin hearings in earnest today toward a pre-Christmas impeachment of President Trump on three or maybe four articles. The allegations will be based on the recent fact-gathering of the House Intelligence Committee. Failure in the Senate to convict soon after the first of the year seems an equal certainty.
The session today will be devoted to expert testimony by constitutional law scholars on the meaning of "high crimes and misdemeanors," if one can consider scholars taking entirely opposite views to be experts. Constitutional scholars called by Democrats will say the accusations against Trump plainly fall under the constitutional language; constitutional scholars called by Republicans will say they most certainly do not. Then the experts will return to their respective corners.
The fact is that the House has sole authority under the Constitution to impeach and may do so as it pleases, subject to partisan resentment and voter backlash. I just saved you a day's testimony.
With the eventual outcome thus known, the political risks exist only in regard to the process. To the extent these new Judiciary Committee hearings will be watched at all, the unknown factor is how thoroughly maddening this new round of proceedings will prove ... and on whom the madness generally will be blamed.
So far, so good for the Democrats.
Smartly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi--resistant at first to impeachment cries based on the inconclusive Mueller Report--directed that the fact-finding hearings into Trump's clearer Ukraine affront would be led by the Intelligence Committee. They would be chaired by the competent Adam Schiff, who, like Pelosi, had understood practicalities and balked at impeachment after Mueller's report.
Polls conducted before Schiff's committee went to work found that about half the respondents thought Trump should be impeached and that the other half either didn't think so or know or much care. Polls after the Intelligence Committee hearings--during which damning details came out against Trump, and Schiff deflected conspiratorial ramblings by ranking Republican Devin Nunes--were about the same.
Schiff ran a tight ship, limiting questioning to staff and designated members while mostly paying scant attention to Nunes and reserving for himself daily summations that were strong and not ineffective.
The House Judiciary Committee is a different animal. The chairman, Jerry Nadler, has even less pretense to judicious objectivity than Schiff brought to his assignment.
Nadler unilaterally instituted a Judiciary Committee "investment inquiry"--his term--even when his speaker was resistant to the term.
And his committee is more blatantly partisan both ways than the Intelligence Committee.
Do you recall when a gaggle of Republican members raided the closed-door inquiry led by Schiff? Some of those grandstanders were Judiciary Committee members, and thus invited to the very meeting they pretended to be crashing.
Finally, the Judiciary Committee's procedure and practice is to run wide open--with all 41 members getting to use their allotted time as they please. Republicans promise to use theirs to label the entire exercise a kangaroo proceeding desperate to bring down Trump and led by a biased chairman who rendered his verdict months ago.
Nadler is a veteran congressman known for being both smart and combative. He'll need in the ensuing days to be plenty of the former and judicious tactically in the latter.
His position is uncommonly delicate. He needs to let Republicans have their say. But he needs not to let them get away with making charges that go unanswered. But he needs not to engage in unattractive shouting matches or free-for-alls that could, and probably would, undercut the Democrats' need to appear restrained and serious in their contemplation of such a sober and somber action.
I would not want to be Nadler.
He and Democrats will need to walk a tightrope while Republicans will need only to wrestle in mud spattered about the central ring.
We know how impeachment will turn out. What we're really talking about, then, is how the election next November will turn out.
That likely hinges on whether Democrats fall from the high wire into the Republicans' mud pit.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
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