It was quite an afternoon for contempt of Congress on Tuesday. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III probably committed the crime of contempt of Congress, while the complete inability of the Senate Intelligence Committee to pursue the matter certainly aroused in me a contempt of Congress that I haven't felt in years. Honest to god, is there a shallower person in public life than Republican Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas? If he wasn't asking JeffBo about his taste in spy novels, he was lying, barefaced, about what went on in the Republican platform committee last summer regarding military aid to the Ukraine. And can we ever get John McCain to stop being cranky about younger senators, especially young female senators, doing their jobs?

And this was something JeffBo said. He referred to the "general strategic concept of the possibility."

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Democracy is helpless against this kind of contempt, especially if its primary institutions surrender to it without a fight, the way they did on Tuesday. To be plain, because of his continual assertion of an "appropriateness" privilege—which does not exist in the Constitution or the laws of this country—in order to avoid answering questions under oath, JeffBo should be residing in a holding cell right now until he changes his mind. (It's very possible that Dan Coats and Mike Rogers should temporarily be his bunkmates, too. And the consistency of the testimony of all three men suggests a certain amount of, ah, coordination at other levels.)

You just don't get to refuse to answer questions before a Senate committee because you don't want to, or because you think you might get the president* in Dutch, or because you don't like the people asking the questions. The Bartleby defense—"I would prefer not to…"—has no basis in constitutional or criminal law. There is no, as Senator Martin Heinrich put it to JeffBo, "appropriateness bucket" in which the attorney general can hide himself. Yet, there he was at the end of things, being flattered by the committee's chairman, Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, for the immense sacrifice JeffBo had made in coming in and being transparently ridiculous on camera for a couple of hours.

The people who best treed JeffBo on his most preposterous bullshit—Heinrich, Kamala Harris of California, and The Mustache of Righteousness, Angus King of Maine—could only push him so far. Everybody on that committee knew that what JeffBo was selling was batter-fried nonsense. (Call me an elitist snob if you like, but whenever I hear a Southerner talking about "mah honah," I reach for William Tecumseh Sherman's phone number.)

Everybody on that committee knew that, when JeffBo declined to answer questions about whether James Comey was fired because of the Russia probe, he was hiding the plain truth behind a privilege that he'd made up on the spot. Everybody on that committee knew that JeffBo's memory lapses were at best highly convenient. (He couldn't remember meeting the Russian ambassador, but he could quote an op-ed by William Barr from almost a year ago? That dog don't even want to hunt.) Everybody on that committee knew that you can't refuse to answer a question because the president* might want to invoke executive privilege at some vague point in the future. But if the majority is content to look like an entire bag of tools and pretend otherwise, there's not much the Senate can do about being obstructed in such a shameless fashion.

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Actually, there is one historical precedent for what Sessions asserted that went unmentioned, and that precedent is not promising. Although even it wasn't as barefaced as it was on Tuesday, the assertion of an illegitimate, unasserted "executive privilege" was, for a long time, central to the defense of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's corrupt AG who went to jail behind his crimes relating to Watergate and what Mitchell himself called, "the White House horrors." It is an argument you make when you know that there is an unacceptable political price to be paid if the president* actually does assert executive privilege in advance—which is what the Obama administration did on several occasions, despite Tom Cotton's having been deliberately and dishonestly obtuse on the comparison during Tuesday's hearings.

There's only a certain amount of sham that our institutions can tolerate. We're getting very close to it.

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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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