On Wednesday, I think I spoke for the entire class when I said, at about 11 a.m.: six freaking hours of this? And that was just the debate around the rules for the impeachment debate to follow.

Meanwhile, across town on Tuesday, a federal judge named Amy Berman Jackson actually talked about what was really going on in Washington. Judge Jackson was there to sentence a former Trump campaign aide named Rick Gates for various crimes committed before he joined the effort to install El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago in the White House. Apparently, Gates has been singing like all Four Tops and was rewarded with a fairly light sentence. Jackson previously had dropped a million-megaton dungbomb on Gates’s old boss, Paul Manafort, something that had to have helped Gates get in tune in a hurry.

But, in the course of sending Gates a short way up a placid river, Jackson chose to speak to the whole country. In doing so, she delineated the vast underground corruption that has bubbled beneath this whole sordid scheme of a campaign and an administration. From CNN:

"What Gates and Manafort were doing was lying to the members of Congress and the American public, saying, Look at this nice American P.R. firm, look at this nice U.S.-based law firm, look at this nice group of prominent European officials. Isn't it great how they voluntarily stepped forward to stand up for the new Ukrainian administration, when all along they were hiding that they and the Ukrainians actually had all those people on their payroll. This deliberate effort to obscure the facts, this disregard for the truth undermines our political discourse and it affects our policymaking. If people don't have the facts, democracy doesn't work.”

"Gates' information alone warranted, indeed demanded, further investigation from the standpoint of our national security, the integrity of our elections and the enforcement of our criminal laws. Not all witnesses with knowledge did cooperate and not everyone who cooperated testified truthfully. And many communications were lost to investigators because they were deleted or they were conducted on an encrypted platform and not saved."

"One of the letter writers said that he [Gates] got caught up in D.C. political drama. But I reject that. It's perfectly possible to conduct yourself with ethics, integrity, and no hint of scandal, even in politics, even in D.C., even in Ukraine. Politics don't corrupt people, people corrupt politics.”

If all the Democrats in the House of Representatives simply read that last sentence, over and over again—for six freaking hours!—their case would be made as clearly as it was made by all the invocations of the Founders, and by all the concern for what their children might think of them in 20 years. People corrupt politics. Damn, ain’t that the truth?

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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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