Nobody seems to have planned the first day at all. Why start with a discussion of the law? Why these particular discussants? Nobody seemed to have considered what Professor 1 should do or why he should be the person to do it. Nobody appeared to have planned how Professor 2 would expand and support the case laid out by Professor 1. What was the strategic rationale for also including Professor 3? Only Professor 4, invited by the House Republicans, seemed to arrive with a clear mission. Unsurprisingly, he was the only one who succeeded in his apparent task: to obfuscate, to confuse, and to maximize his future TV bookings.

Joshua A. Geltzer: The legal debate about impeachment is over

In the end, the professors called by the majority sabotaged their testimony by their deportment. Pamela Karlan’s quip about Barron Trump’s baronial name could not have been less provocative. And, obviously, the most acid-tongued and demeaning president in American history has no standing to complain about how anyone else speaks.

Yet the Trump White House’s propensity for soccer flops is a notorious fact, readily anticipated. The members of the same first family that demand the death penalty for their critics will howl and wail and clutch their shins at the lightest joke about them. That performance will then be amplified by an infrastructure of conservative media. It’s all as fake as an operatic death scene, and there are definitely days to challenge and mock the White House’s self-pitying melodramatics. Precisely for this well-advertised reason, it would have been wise to weigh in advance: Was today to provide fuel to the pro-Trump self-pity industry? Instead, the Democrats’ ineffectual messaging delivered Republicans the opportunity to seize control of the debate with a stronger message, however contrived and insincere.

What should the majority have done instead?

The House Intelligence Committee’s forceful report addressed two issues: Trump’s abuse of power to extort a bribe from Ukraine, and the subsequent obstruction of justice to conceal the extortion.

The Intelligence Committee’s hearings powerfully dramatized the first of these issues. The Judiciary Committee’s hearings should have dramatized the second.

The minority complains that the American people have not heard from firsthand witnesses to the extortion. This is not true. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman listened to the July call in which Trump delivered the extortion message directly to the president of Ukraine. Ambassador Gordon Sondland led the extortion project. Ambassador Bill Taylor witnessed the extortion in real time. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was the extortion ring’s first target.

Still, important witnesses have heeded the president’s order not to testify. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani led the conspiracy; Energy Secretary Rick Perry participated in it; National Security Adviser John Bolton tried to stop it. All refused to testify. The process of enforcing subpoenas upon them all will be slow.