The Senate chambers of the United States of America, where that august body has resided since 1859 after moving through several earlier homes, is a two-storey precinct roughly two-thirds the size of an NHL ice surface with 100 desks on a tiered semi-circular platform facing a raised central rostrum.

It is overlooked on all sides by galleries and, owing to that theatre-like construction, has been used over the generations for numerous non-legislative performances.

Among these was a presentation in 1863 of a narrative poem, The Sleeping Sentinel, to an audience that included Abraham Lincoln.

Seldom, if ever, can the place have hosted such an act as was performed this week at the opening of the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump.

For farce, sophistry, cynicism – punctuated by occasional moments of virtuosity – it was tough to beat, even in the gas-lit, lie-strewn political landscape of contemporary America.

For openers, it was difficult to take seriously the sight of Republican senators signing with due solemnity oaths to act as impartial jurors in the case scant hours after assuring Fox News they intended nothing of the sort.

In fact, their stated approach to proceedings threw doubt on the assertion by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts that the assembly over which he presided was “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Eyebrows understandably arched at such superlatives after Republicans ordained before hearings commenced that journalists would be penned away from their normal vantage points and that C-SPAN cameras would show no reaction shots from senators – the better that they could flout rules by wandering from their seats and the chamber.

The limiting of coverage to a fixed shot of whoever had the floor, before a background of what appeared to be black marble, seemed designed to encourage casual viewers to grab for the remote.

What has been notable about the entire Trump-Ukraine scandal is its Olympian ham-handedness.

It is pretty much as Democrat Hakeem Jeffries put it: a case where the bad acts are hiding in plain sight.

All who testified before the House investigation that led to Trump’s impeachment – people of impeccable credentials with little to gain and lots to lose by stepping up — told a story supporting only one possible conclusion: that Trump did just what he is alleged to have done for exactly the reasons suggested.

He and sidekick Rudy Giuliani were essentially shaking down the new president of beleaguered Ukraine for political assistance that would help rig the 2020 election in Trump’s favour.

The particulars being that he withheld mandated military support for Ukraine and a White House meeting with the new president to leverage that country into investigating Joe Biden, his most feared Democratic opponent in 2020.

While there has been much sound and fury from his Republican courtiers, and Category 5 tweet-storms from the commander-in-chief himself, Trump has produced no evidence to suggest there is any other way to interpret his acts.

Instead, he has barricaded himself behind walls of bluster, refusing to let his underlings testify and refusing release of documents that one would think – if his claims of perfect comportment had merit – would exonerate him.

Not only that, in the down-the-rabbit-hold world of American politics, he taunted his critics by essentially confirming their allegations.

“Honestly, we have all the material,” he told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “They don’t have the material.”

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This may have qualified as one of the few times the president began a sentence with the word “honestly,” then actually delivered.

On the third day of hearings, Trump impeachment lawyer Jay Sekulow made his play for the Bill-Clinton-Memorial-Word-Parsing gold medal.

The former president, it will be recalled, explained while undergoing his own impeachment woes a generation ago that the answer to a question put to him depended on what “the definition of is is.”

“Notice what’s not in the articles of impeachment, accusations or allegations of quid pro quo!” Sekulow crowed to reporters.

As journalists were quick to note, while the Latin phrase was not there a description of Trumpian deeds constituting the very definition of leveraging something for something most definitely was.

The saving grace of Week One in the Trump impeachment was the work of Democrat Adam Schiff, his party’s lead manager of the case.

Over two days, before proceedings moved on to legal arguments, he delivered a masterful chronology of what he alleged unfolded in Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Schiff’s sense of historical moment was riveting, his rhetoric compelling as he summoned Republicans to their duty.

“Nothing could be more dangerous to a democracy than a commander-in-chief who believed that he could operate with impunity, free from accountability.

“Nothing, that is, except a Congress that is willing to let it be so.”

Which seems pretty much how things stand in the once shining city on a hill.

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