As a general matter, it shouldn’t be surprising that 13 of the 15 Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee have law degrees.

If you’ve watched any of the televised impeachment hearings, however, you might find that hard to believe. As a refresher course for the benefit of Republicans — and as general information for Americans trying in vain to make sense of the arguments lobbed in defense of Donald Trump — here are a few basic first-year law school concepts the GOP seems to have forgotten.

Circumstantial evidence. The timeworn example given by law professors and judges, instructing jurors, is this: you may conclude the mail was delivered from the presence of tracks in new snow, leading to a previously empty mailbox in which letters are found, although no one saw the mail carrier.

You may, therefore, also conclude, that the sudden release of previously blocked funds designated for Ukraine did not occur because Donald Trump was relieved to discover that anti-corruption reforms were indeed underway in that country.

As explained immediately below, a “permitted” — dare I say “rationally compelling” — inference is that the public hue and cry over the president’s “perfect” call, coupled with the announcement of Congressional investigations, upended a corrupt scheme to withhold funds.

Permitted inference. Any juror (here’s looking at you, 100 members of the U.S. Senate) can reach conclusions that follow logically from the evidence. Common sense and everyday experience allow such inferences to be made, even without direct evidence. (See circumstantial evidence.)

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Nov. 15, 2019. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

Another example: In the absence of any cogent explanation for the recall of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whose tour of duty in Ukraine had recently been extended, you may conclude that the campaign of denigration conducted by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, followed by the arrival on the scene of the “three amigos” — Perry, Voelker and Sondland — was intended to clear the decks for the pressure campaign that ensued.

Hearsay. We’ve been hearing this one a lot lately. The hearsay rule is intended to remove unreliable second-hand reports and outright rumor from the fact-finding process. That doesn’t render all second-hand statements inadmissible in court. Far from it.

When Republicans default to their mantra “Hearsay!” we must ask what the evidence is intended to prove. When David Holmes, the career foreign service officer, testified that he overheard Donald Trump ask Gordon Sondland, “So he’s going to do the investigations?” he is providing direct testimony, not hearsay, that the president made the statement. That, in turn, permits the inference (see above) that Trump was concerned about the investigations.