WASHINGTON—My new old friend, Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, was bouncing with delight. Considering that the latest Morning Consult poll has her five points underwater back home, this showed a remarkable joie de vivre, which made her sarcasm positively effervescent. She spoke in fluent Italics. “I am excited that all of these members are going to be supporting the United States military as we bring up military spending,” she said. “Whether that’s the new Space Force, whether that’s autonomous vehicles, AI, hypersonics, all of those things we need to push back against Russia, and I am glad to know they’ve publicly stated it.” Apparently, proving that the president* blackjacked Ukraine by withholding military aid makes you obligated to fund every wild hair that grows upon the Pentagon procurement people.

(Ernst also was passing notes around noting how many of the House managers had missed various military funding votes in the past year. Unfortunately for her, one of the votes Jerrold Nadler missed because his wife was ill.)

Ernst had gathered with several of her colleagues during Thursday night’s dinner break in the impeachment trial of the President* of the United States. Joining her were John Barrasso of Wyoming, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Tim Scott of South Carolina. Ernst, Lankford, and Scott all had been rumored to be possible votes in favor of calling witnesses when and if that comes to a vote sometime next week. But on Thursday night, with the president*’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, and White House spokesman Hogan Gidley chatting about eight feet away, all of them spoke like good McConnellite functionaries.

“We want to get the whole story,” Lankford said. “I was trying to take notes today on how many half-truths we were hearing—that they were telling part of the story, but not the other part. Or they would talk about the phone call, but conveniently leave the sentence out before or the sentence out afterwards.”

Ernst zeroed-in on the military funding aspect. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS Getty Images

“We’ve heard the same story, over and over again, for two days,” Scott added. “There’s an old saying that, if you say it often enough, it must be true. The good news is that the Democrats have literally bought into that premise that if you say it often enough, it’s true. We’ve heard the same story—rinse it, recite it, repeat it. And what is that story? That the President of the United States has no authority whatsoever to look for injustice or corruption anywhere, even in the 2016 election. And it is a sad day for our nation that the House managers are telling the same story, over and over again, with no basis in fact. My frustration is that the American people are only getting half the story.”

All week there were little signs that little things were going sideways. First, Mitch McConnell actually changed his original rules for how the trial would be managed. Then, on Wednesday, Robert Ray, one of the two former Whitewater special prosecutors on the White House defense team, went on Fox News and conspicuously declined to compliment lead attorneys Pat Cipollone and Sekulow.

But all of the big stuff—including every vote taken so far—has gone straight down party lines. The idea that four Republicans will vote to hear witnesses seems as remote as ever, and the notion that 14 of these Ernsts, Scotts, and Lankfords actually would vote to convict the president* and remove him from office remains utterly preposterous. The whole party in Congress doesn’t seem to be thinking past tomorrow’s lunch menu, and even these young stars don’t seem able to reckon with what their futures might be, or with the prospect the marks on their political souls might be permanent.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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