On Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee convened to formally delve into the grim task of debriefing Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. The main event was the testimony of Sally Yates, the former Acting Attorney General who, shortly before she was fired by President Trump, had reportedly warned the White House about disgraced former National Security Director Michael Flynn's connections to Russia. But even at a hearing literally titled “Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Election," the esteemed Republican senators in attendance spent the afternoon falling all over themselves in an outrageously transparent and hilariously frantic effort to talk about anything else.

More or less, this is how the day unfolded: Democrats asked Yates about her knowledge of Flynn's alleged Kremlin ties, especially in the context of her abrupt termination. They did this, presumably, because they are concerned that a hostile foreign power tipped the balance of power in a United States presidential election, and because they want to know the extent, if any, to which Trump's team knew of or participated in the operation. Their Republican counterparts, naturally, responded by using their allotted time to yell about "unmasking," ask basic questions about constitutional law, and talk about Hillary Clinton's emails, because it is now apparently GOP policy that all elected officials must say the words "private email server" at least once a day.

Here is South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, who would have you believe that the most important aspect of the alleged Trump-Russia links is finding out how that information made it into the press.

Here is John Cornyn, the former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice, angrily asking Yates about her refusal to enforce President Trump's stupid Muslim ban—the event that precipitated her termination. (Russia? Never heard of it!) Multiple federal courts have since endorsed Yates' view by putting the ban in the trash, and there is a proud American tradition of attorneys general refusing to comply with orders they believe to be unlawful, but neither recent nor distant history was going to prevent Cornyn from working himself into a self-righteous, condescending huff.