That is: One can’t be a limited lackey. Not for this president, anyway. When it comes to toadying for Donald John Trump, if you’re in for a docile dime, you’re in for a dignity-debasing dollar.

They are learning a hard lesson in the perils and pitfalls of hackery.

And once you’ve trod the road to serfdom in a yoke of servility, it’s difficult indeed to break free of your fellow travelers and pursue the truth. Unless, of course, a failure to do so puts one at risk of an even greater public humiliation than being reduced to a lickspittle.


What a dilemma for a poor spineless senator to be forced to face!

Nor has the president’s defense team done much to help.

Mind you, it tried. This week, the defense treated the Senate and the nation to a lengthy disquisition on the abuses of impeachment.

Problem: The lead presenter was none other than Ken Starr, who two decades ago almost single-handedly transformed the probe of a failed land deal into a seamy dive into Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Starr’s intonation made it obvious he thought his warning was fraught with historical import. For the non-irony-deprived, however, it was a little like listening to Captain Hazelwood opine about the history of negligence in Alaskan oil spills, while omitting any critical mention of the Exxon Valdez or its skipper.

Then came big legal tuna Alan Dershowitz, with a new and nearly unique theory as pertains to impeachment: Trump can’t be properly removed from office for an abuse of power that is not also a crime.

There is, of course, a slight historical problem here: During the Clinton impeachment, Dershowitz held the opposite view. Thus it was that reconciling his current and past positions left him engaged in a game of legal Twister with his doppelganger. Still, credit where it’s due: The Dersh at least acknowledged what he says now is at odds with his past stance.


To grease the gears of that credibility-straining pivot, Alan added an elastic caveat to the Trump-tailored Dershowitz Doctrine: A noncriminal abuse of power can be impeachable if it involves criminal-like acts.

Which means what? Well, apparently that Dershowitz realizes his creative new constitutional concoction is best served in a dense broth of octopus ink.

Some senators clung wistfully to witless arguments. Like, say, that since the House hadn’t heard testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton, there was simply no need for the Senate to do so.

Problem number one: Bolton refused a House invitation to testify and indicated he would fight a subpoena. But he has since said he will abide by one. That’s a significant change.

Problem number two: Past impeachments make it crystal clear the Senate can call witnesses.

But none other than Senator Mitt Romney of Utah highlighted the biggest problem of all.

“It has been pointed out . . . that there has not been evidence of a direct nature of what the president may have said or what his motives were or what he did,” Romney noted. “The article in The New York Times I think made it pretty clear that [Bolton] has some information that may be relevant. And I’d like to hear relevant information before I made a final decision.”


Damn that off-the-script Mitt! Why would any proper Republican want to hear from Bolton? After all, the account he will apparently give, according to the Times’s reporting about his soon-to-be-published book, is that Trump told him he wanted to withhold the aid to Ukraine until that country helped with an investigation into political rival and former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

And double damn that renegade Bolton! After all, Republican senators would be fine with their call-no-witnesses, duck-and-coverup stance but for his authorial ambitions.

Revelations about Bolton’s manuscript have created a terrible quandary, however.

Can Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s ostriches carry on with the head-in-the-sand posture subservience that this president requires?

Or, with Bolton’s book threatening to roll off the presses and into their tail feathers like that boulder in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” must they finally squeak, um, speak up?

Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh