Closing arguments in the impeachment trial of the president* happened on Monday in the Senate. As background, over the past weekend, a number of the Republican senators who voted against hearing witnesses last Friday, thereby snuffing out even the most drug-induced hopes for convicting El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, admitted that they thought the president* indeed had shaken down the government of Ukraine in an effort to ratfck the 2020 election, but that they did not consider that to be a serious enough offense to remove the president* from office. (Senators Lamar Alexander and Marco Rubio were particularly weasel-like in their admissions.) All along, this has been the avenue of defense available to the administration* and its allies that was the least insulting to human intelligence. Now that they clearly Have The Votes, they seem to have regained so much of their faith in it that they feel free to let their constitutional freak flags fly, high and proud.

So, when Chief Justice—and gifted potted-plant cosplayer—John Roberts gaveled things in on Monday, he was opening the final act of a dispiriting puppet show. I have to say that the House managers didn’t get off to the greatest start. Rep. Jason Crow attempted to summon the Senate’s constitutional obligation to be a disinterested trier of fact in the case of presidential impeachment. To back up his argument, Crow cited Daniel Webster’s politically suicidal “Seventh of March” speech in which Webster spoke in defense of the infamous Compromise of 1850. That speech, which John F. Kennedy cited, wrongly, in Profiles In Courage, attempted to middle-way the rising national rage over slavery. Crow cited it as an example of how the Senate should act as a disinterested body. Thus was the case for impeaching this president* transformed into an argument against abolitionism. I did not consider this a promising beginning, especially considering the fact that the president*’s case was sure to turn into a gaslight you could see on Venus. They did not disappoint.

Kennetth Starr contributed to proceedings as only he can. Bill Clark Getty Images

It was the same shabby quilt of lies, omissions, and disinformation that they’ve been peddling for a couple of weeks. For example, they have leaned hard into a tweet by Mark Zaid, the lawyer for the whistleblower who spoke out against the shakedown, in which Zaid wrote that “#coup has started,” without mentioning that Zaid was referring to the president*’s firing of then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. They kept referring to executive privilege, as though it were sacred writ, and, in any case, the president* has not yet asserted it. And, of course, there was Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel who, if John Bolton is to be believed, sat in on meetings in which was discussed the shakedown that he has spent two weeks denying ever occurred. This, at least, should have awakened Roberts. But it didn’t, because these are the things that happen when you Have The Votes.

But the episode that demonstrated how completely contemptuous you can be when you Have The Votes was the reappearance of Ken Starr, the most singularly odious toad ever to creep out of Republican politics. Starr took the opportunity to gather up the words of his moral superiors to draw a trail of slime that the Republicans could follow to an acquittal.

And we hear the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. And his dream filled speech about freedom echoing the great passages inscribed on America's temple of justice, the Lincoln Memorial which stood behind Dr. King as he spoke on that historic day. Dr. King is gone, failed by an assassin's bullet, that his words remain with us. During his magnificent life, Dr. King spoke not only about freedom, freedom standing alone, he spoke frequently about freedom and justice. And in his speeches he summed it up regularly, , the words of Unitarian abolitionists from the prior century, Theodore Parker who referred to the moral arc of the universe, the long moral arc of the universe points towards justice. Freedom and justice.

Yes, I have lived long enough to see the name of Dr. King in the mouth of a sanctimonious hack like Ken Starr in defense of a renegade president*. Maybe Jason Crow could’ve picked a better speech out of history to make his pitch for a Senate that takes itself seriously, but Ken Starr took that history and profaned it as though it were his own blue dress. I have lived long enough to see that, and it makes me wonder.

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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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