There was a point during the Senate’s alternate grilling and chilling with Attorney General Bill Barr when you could hear the ghost of Richard Nixon crying.

Nixon took one final helicopter flight from the White House a generation too soon. He shuffled off this mortal coil a decade too early for redemption.

Because judging from the Republican response to the Mueller report, there is no way today’s Congress would have come close to impeaching Tricky Dick.

It was Kamala Harris, the former prosecutor and current presidential candidate, who exposed the very long distance traveled by Republicans over the last 45 years.

She began with a simple question of an attorney general who was supposed to apply some establishment lacquer to the grifters and jokers who are the best and brightest on Planet Trump. Instead, he revealed himself to the biggest grifter of them all: a fake attorney general defending a fraudulent administration.

“Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone,” she asked for starters.

The otherwise unflappable Barr looked up to the heavens and pouted. “Um, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, er,” he staggered.

“Yes or no,” she replied, prompting a pause that wanted to last until the next recess.

“Could you,” asked Barr, “could you repeat that question?”

“I will repeat it,” said the senator all too cheerfully. Sitting next to Harris, her fellow Democratic senator and candidate, Cory Booker, could barely suppress his smirk.

She repeated the question and fixed her prey with a stare: “Yes or no please, sir.”

“Um,” pouted the attorney general. “The president or anybody else…”

His interrogator said he would probably remember that kind of thing.

“Yeah but I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest.’ I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there,” Barr said, waving his hand expansively around the universe, “but they have not asked me to open an investigation.”

“Perhaps they have suggested,” Harris obligingly suggested herself.

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t say suggest,” said Barr.

“Hinted? Inferred? You don’t know,” concluded Harris.

And so it came to pass that the attorney general of the United States pretended that he couldn’t remember if the president had tried to use the justice department to pursue his personal enemies.

Nixon was unlucky enough to be president at a time when Republicans and Democrats thought it was an impeachable matter to abuse power.

Reasonable people might disagree about what constitutes an abuse of power. But reasonable lawyers would all agree that a president suggesting, inferring or hinting at an investigation of someone like a political opponent would be just such an abuse of power.

That is, naturally, what Trump was suggesting in the days after Bill Barr covered up Trump’s Russia cover-up, with a simple letter that whitewashed all the dirt from the Mueller report. Trump said publicly that his opponents had done “very, very evil things” and “some treasonous things” that would be “looked at” to prevent them happening again.

This obviously should concern the Republicans who believed that Barack Obama’s attorney general was hopelessly compromised by a tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton, during the 2016 election. It should also concern the Republicans – yes, we’re looking at you Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate judiciary committee – who led the impeachment trial of the same Bill Clinton in 1999.

Back then, Graham said a president didn’t have to tell people to lie or obstruct justice for it to be a crime. Now he says there’s no need for Mueller to testify about obstruction of justice because, as he explained on Wednesday, “Enough already. It’s over.”

Graham and Barr kicked off the day’s proceedings with a series of meatball questions and answers to demonstrate how simpatico their thinking was.

Was it possible to obstruct justice with no underlying crime? Hell no. Could Mueller indict anyone he wanted? Yessiree. Is Donald Trump the Mother Teresa of modern politics? Quite possibly.

How this must disturb Nixon’s ghost, who has long muttered something about the lack of proof tying him directly to a third-rate burglary. The infamous smoking gun tape was about the cover-up, specifically his attempt to stop the FBI’s investigation.

With a Lindsey Graham and Bill Barr in his pocket, Nixon could have happily served out his term. After all, as Barr explained to Senator Diane Feinstein, Trump didn’t try to fire Mueller because he might have replaced him. How could that be a firing, never mind obstruction of justice? And what is reality anyway?

As it happens, Nixon did fire one special prosecutor and replace him with another. But those were distant days when the English language still clung to old-fashioned things like meaning. In those days, obstruction of justice translated into something like obstructing justice.

Which brings us to the archaic, muted figure of the special counsel himself: Robert Mueller. The noble crusader for justice left it up to the conscience of Congress and the professional prosecutors of the justice department to draw the lines around obstruction.

This turns out to be a bit like debating the Queensberry rules of boxing in the middle of a barroom brawl.

While Mueller was exploring the legal intricacies of an obstruction case against a sitting president, Republican senators preferred to explore the text messages between two FBI employees.

Thank you, Mr Mueller for concluding there was no explicit agreement between Team Trump and the criminal Russian conspiracy to hack the 2016 election. But have you read the text from Peter Strzok when he visited a Walmart in southern Virginia? He said he could smell the Trump support!

“An unelected official in this government who clearly has open disdain, if not outright hatred for Trump voters,” said Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who has finally, thankfully, identified what is ailing our democracy: the craven stupidity of Trump’s defenders on Capitol Hill.

Nixon’s third impeachment article was contempt of Congress, and depending on how Trump stiffs the House Democrats, we may reach that point quite quickly. Then again, it’s hard to be in contempt of a Congress that is so blazingly contemptible all on its own.