WASHINGTON—On Monday, in a nursing home in Arizona, a man named Tom Railsback died. He was 87. In all the hurly-burly here, his death went largely unremarked upon. At one time, Tom Railsback was a rising star in the Republican Party. In 1966, he was elected to Congress to represent that 19th Congressional District in Illinois. He credited former Vice President Richard Nixon for helping him get elected. Nixon had come to western Illinois and campaigned for Railsback personally. Eight years later, and 45 years ago last July, Railsback was sitting as a member of the House Judiciary Committee in judgment of Richard Nixon, the President of the United States, in the matter of Nixon’s impeachment for crimes related to what Nixon’s disgraced attorney general, John Mitchell, had called, “the White House horrors.”

Gradually, Railsback came to the realization that the man who had helped put him in office was a criminal and that he would have to vote the articles of impeachment against him out of committee. He was one of three Republicans who joined with four conservative Southern Democrats to provide the crucial votes that not only guaranteed that the committee would report the articles out favorably, but also that it would do so with unquestioned legitimacy. Railsback hung on for a few more terms, but his promising future faded away on a July evening when he could do nothing but what his conscience told him to do. And on Monday, he died. On Tuesday, of course, the evidence that the principles he’d espoused were dead became overwhelming.

The first episode of Bag Jobs After Dark was enlivened by two freak occurrences. At one point, White House lawyer Pat Cipollone—who, if there is any justice in god’s sweet universe, will soon be advertising his legal services on late-night cable TV—took it upon himself to take a slap at House Judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler and, by way of doing that, said this remarkable thing.

"President Trump," he said, "is a man of his word."

I heard America’s spit-take.

"President Trump is a man of his word." FABRICE COFFRINI Getty Images

The Nadler-Cipollone colloquy even managed to bestir Chief Justice John Roberts, who summoned up every inch of his dignity to remind the litigants on both sides that they were addressing “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” This amused whatever historians were awake who could call to mind Preston Brooks’s caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber, and the episode in 1917 when another senator came at Fightin’ Bob LaFollette with a homemade shiv. And it amused everyone else when they remembered that Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn are members of the Senate today.

(I have to give Roberts credit, though. He hung in there despite the fact that he had to go back on duty at his day job on Wednesday morning, when he was due to hear oral arguments on a crucial case regarding church-and-state relations. Good ol’ Chief Justice Double Duty.)

The House managers were due to embark on their opening arguments on Wednesday afternoon. They will have 24 hours to do so, after which the president*’s legal team will get the same amount of time to pound their fists and yell about Barack Obama. It is very likely that nothing much will have changed by the end of things except that Tom Railsback, and the principles that enabled him to rise to the greatest moment of his life, will still be dead.

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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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