In Joanne Freeman's wonderful The Field of Blood, her history of how the House of Representatives functioned as a kind of ur-UFC in the years leading up to the Civil War, we are introduced to Benjamin Brown French, a clerk of the House who functioned, through his tireless diary-keeping, as a kind of Virgil to Freeman's Dante. For example, Freeman brings us French's account of what he called The Great Fight of 1841.

As much as French recognized the dire implications of congressional chaos at key moments like session openings and closings, he perked up when he saw a good man-to-man brawl. It was one of the things that he liked about his job; when fists flew, he had a ringside seat. He reveled in what he called the “great fight” of 1841, which began when Edward Stanly (W-NC) and Henry Wise (W-VA) exchanged insults. When Wise slugged Stanly, “nearly all the members” rushed over and began pummeling one another in a wild melee. “[T]he Speaker & I had the best chance to see all the fun,” French wrote to his half brother, “& while he stood at his desk pounding & yelling, I stood at mine ‘calm as a summer’s morning’—enjoying the sport, and keeping the minutes of the proceedings!”

Or, as it would one day come to be known in another context, the blow-by-blow.

(And just by way of shameless pluggery, Freeman's book should be read in tandem with Barbara Holland's mordantly hilarious history of dueling, Gentlemen's Blood, in which two doctors at Charity Hospital in New Orleans conduct their affair of honor over the prostrate body of a patient, who was dying of a stab wound at the time. Och, as Mr. Dooley once said, thim was the days.)



I mention all of this because, by all indications, as this impeachment business rolls along, Freeman could v find work on television as the Angelo Dundee of legislative violence. The Republicans are spoiling for a fight, and not necessarily a rhetorical one. The challenge was hurled on Thursday afternoon by Rep. Louie Gohmert, Padishah Emperor of the Crazy People.

“Never in the history of this country have we had such gross unfairness that one party would put armed guards with guns to prevent the duly authorized people from being able to hear the witnesses and see them for themselves...That’s not the kind of evidence that a coup should be based on. If we’re going to have what they’re trying to legalize as a coup, we ought to have a right to see each of those witnesses. It’s about to push this country to a civil war if they were to get their wishes,” Gohmert opined. “And if there’s one thing I don’t want to see in my lifetime, I don’t want to ever have participation in, it’s a civil war. Some historian, I don’t remember who, said, guns are only involved in the last phase of a civil war.”



There's been a lot of loose talk on this theme ever since the president*'s crimes and malfeasance became too obvious to ignore. Every time someone talks about "overturning" the 2016 election—because, in the interim, we've discovered that the president* may be a bigger crook than any of us imagined—it pushes that counter-narrative a little further along. And since that's all they've really got, we're going to hear more—and more exaggerated—variations on that theme as the process grinds along. Fists may fly, I'm warning you.



Anything to defend, uh, Donald Trump. Scott Olson Getty Images

Also, one of the more amusing sidelights of the action so far is the Republican insistence on framing the Great Penis Hunt of 1998 as a model of congressional sobriety, probity, and fairness, when all of us who lived through the damn thing know that the GPH was merely the final gasp of a seven-year campaign to find something that would enable them to get rid of Bill Clinton. Whitewater. Filegate. TravelGate. Castle Grande. Hell, they had two congressional committees and two special prosecutors look into poor Vince Foster's suicide. There was that epic moment before the House Judiciary Committee when Ken Starr had to admit under oath that there was nothing to any of that stuff and that the blowjobs were the only thing they had left. (Also, because of the insistence by Brett Kavanaugh that all the steamy stuff be included in the Starr Report, we ended up knowing far more about Bill Clinton's dick than we currently know about Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank.) And that's not even to mention that Starr's office was a sieve.



Apparently, Ken Starr ran an investigation that was a model of calm restraint. LUKE FRAZZA Getty Images

And the most interesting thing to me remains the fact that, all through the process in 1998, we heard earnest speeches from the Republicans about the rule of law, and about long contemplative walks on the beach, and about looking deeply into their children's eyes, and quotes from Thomas More—or, at least, from Robert Bolt's conception of Thomas More—concerning the grave responsibility of impeaching Bill Clinton. And yet, after it failed, it fell completely down the GOP memory hole. Nobody took pride in doing their duty, or of fighting the good fight. Hardly any Republican even has mentioned it until today when, in defense of an array of transparently impeachable offenses, the GPH was cited as a model of fairness and good government. Yeah, we're all going to be stumbling our way through the fog machine for a while, sports fans.

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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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