From time to time in the Trump era, Republican members of Congress have found themselves stricken with blindness, deafness, illiteracy, or some combination thereof. Their affliction tends to manifest whenever President Donald Trump and his allies do something troubling. They claimed that they didn’t watch coverage of a rally where his supporters chanted “Send her back!” about an immigrant member of Congress and asserted that they had never even heard of Roy Moore during his scandal-ridden Senate campaign in 2018. The symptoms are most severe whenever those members run into reporters in the hallways of Capitol Hill. Suddenly, GOP lawmakers profess that they have not seen a TV, or checked the internet, or participated in the Industrial Revolution.

The Senate’s impeachment trial is a useful antidote. It is unlikely that 67 senators will vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, largely because that number can only be attained with the help of 20 Republican senators. I wrote on Tuesday that this process is also a trial for the Senate as an institution, as well as the senators themselves. Ignorance is not a legal defense, and if nothing else, the House managers have made it impossible for their colleagues to deny that they knew what happened.

Day two of the trial began on Wednesday with the opening statement from California Representative Adam Schiff and the other six managers who act as the president’s effective prosecutors in this trial. Schiff, a former prosecutor who now chairs the House Intelligence Committee, spent more than two hours delivering an able summary of the case. He received effusive praise from legal observers on Twitter. Even South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s most obsequious allies in Congress, told Schiff later that he did a “good job” and was “very well-spoken.”



Schiff is not a particularly dramatic or emotive speaker. He instead punctuated his staid remarks with video clips of the president and his associates in their own words, as well as portions of testimony from the witnesses who appeared before Congress last fall. The weaving together of their words and his analysis worked well. Perhaps the most dramatic moment came when he played footage of the infamous moment last October when Trump publicly declared that not only should Ukraine launch an investigation into the Bidens, but China should do the same.

At the time, Trump’s comments drew a murmur of criticism from GOP lawmakers, though most still kept quiet. Schiff brought it front and center. “This should concern all of us,” he said. “It’s a confirmation not only of the scheme to pressure Ukraine to help his political campaign, but a clear sign that the president believes that these corrupt acts are acceptable. A president this unapologetic, this lawless, this unbound to the Constitution and the oath of office must be removed from that office, lest he continue to use the vast presidential powers at his disposal to seek advantage in the next election.”