Congressional hearings are generally a confused mess, especially when they deal with issues on which there are strong partisan feelings. This is because there are a large number of people on the panel and, being politicians, they tend to make speeches to impress their base back home rather than ask questions that might elicit information or clarify issues. Furthermore, those who want to confuse the matter can introduce red herrings, filibuster, engage in endless repetition, raise points of order that are not points of order, and in so many ways sow confusion.

The current hearings into the events of January 6th are remarkably different. They have put out a clear timeline of events, interweaving live testimony with pre-recorded ones and supplementing those with documents and other forms of evidence. This is because each day’s questioning is largely led by a single designated person and they clearly had carefully planned goals in mind for each session. The hearings are playing out like a TV mini-series, including cliff-hangers for the episodes to come.
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The January 6th hearings yesterday focused on the attempts by Trump and his minions to use the Department of Justice to advance his lies that the election was fraudulent. In yet another gripping day of testimony, three of the most senior justice department officials during the last days of his presidency (acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, acting deputy assistant general Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel) describe how Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and others enlisted the assistant attorney general for civil affairs Jeffrey Clark to try and get the justice department to send a letter drafted by Clark, to Georgia elections officials saying that the election in that state was invalid. Clark would meet with Trump, defying rules that prevented justice department officials from meeting with White House officials without approval of the attorney general, a policy designed to prevent undue political pressure.

The committee’s top Republican Liz Cheney is offering more details about the actions of justice department official Jeffrey Clark, who had his house raided today by federal investigators.

According to Cheney, Clark and another justice department lawyer drafted a letter addressed to the Georgia state legislature, which would have said the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia”, and that the legislature should convene and consider approving a new slate of electors.

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An example of the depths to which the Republican party has sunk can be seen in Chris Cillizza’s description about what went down at the convention of the Republican party in Texas last weekend.

* They approved a measure that stated that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected.”

* They rebuked the 10 Senate Republicans involved in the bipartisan talks on gun legislation — including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was booed during his speech Friday at the convention.

* They voted to advance language in the party platform that describes homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and calls on students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child.”

* They harassed Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling him “eye patch McCain.” (Crenshaw lost an eye during military service in Afghanistan.)

Taken together, the message was simple: This is Donald Trump’s party. Period. End of sentence.

“Donald Trump radicalized the party and accelerated the demands from the base,” University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus told the Texas Tribune. “There simply aren’t limits now on what the base might ask for.”

So what was Crenshaw’s sin that so offended his Republican colleagues? It was that at an event late last year in Texas, Crenshaw said this:

“There’s two types of members of Congress: There’s performance artists and legislators. The performance artists are the ones that get all the attention, the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well, they know how to recite the lines that they know our voters want to hear.”

Later, he added this: “We have grifters in our midst … in the conservative movement. Lie after lie after lie.”

So his sin was telling it like it is. If you do not buy completely into the fantasy world created by Trump, you have gone over to the enemy and must be destroyed.

Cornyn and Crenshaw are as right-wing as they come but that is not enough these days. The Republican party is beginning to eat its own.

The revelations of Trump’s utter contempt for democracy because of his attempts to overturn the election results get worse with each day of public congressional hearings, if you can believe it. The fourth day of congressional hearings yesterday saw a stream of solidly Republican state election officials in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, all of whom voted for Trump, describe the awful abuse and harassment they experienced when they refused to go along with the Trump gang’s demands that they reject the results of the elections in their state and substitute alternate delegates, and the blatant lies that they were told as to the supposed evidence that existed of mass fraud. It should be emphasized that Trump was not simply uttering falsehoods about fraud. He consistently displayed a blatant disregard for truth, repeatedly telling lies that he had been told were lies even by his own administration officials.

The evidence is mounting that the events of January 6th, 2021 were not isolated but the culmination of a concerted effort by Trump and his cronies to overturn the election, and that they were willing to go to almost any lengths to do so. After listening to these hearings, what surprises me is that he did not order the military to act to keep him in power, so determined was he to stay in power.
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When the UK voted to leave the EU in what was known as Brexit, it was known that the status of Ireland would cause problems. This is because the UK leaving the EU meant that there would have to be a customs and tariffs border between the two trading blocs. A line in the English Channel would not work since the Republic of Ireland was in the EU while Northern Ireland, being part of the UK, would be out. Hence where would the border line be drawn? It was unthinkable to have a land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland as there was during the time of the bitter conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The Belfast agreement that ended that conflict also resulted in the free movement of Irish people between the two parts of the island and almost no one wants to see a border reintroduced. Boris Johnson, one of the chief proponents of Brexit, breezily claimed that he could solve the problem somehow. But his actions seem to be making the situation much worse.
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