Consider me blessed. I was traveling and then attending to personal matters most of today, so I didn’t get to watch the Senate impeachment trial proceedings.

What did I miss? Adam Schiff and other Democrats scratching their nails on a blackboard?

I’ve seen this show before for two years of permanent crisis news cycle about supposed Russia collusion and then during the House impeachment ram-job on Ukraine. Does anyone need to see it again? Will ANY minds be changed?

I was able to check in on Twitter from time to time, and I take it the president’s lawyers did well because those supporting impeachment were in full fury at Pat Cippilone, the president’s chief lawyer at the trial. They want to disbar him, to hound him out of the legal practice, and so on.

Late in the morning, before the trial started, I was on the Tony Katz Radio Show.

The subject was my post If Senate Republicans take the hard vote now on impeachment witnesses, they will not regret it in November.

[If player doesn’t load, click here]

KATZ: Let me bring in William Jacobson, Cornell law professor, the brains behind LegalInsurrection.com, taking a swing at impeachment saying, and I’m quoting here from the headline at legalinsurrection.com “If Senate Republicans take the hard vote now on impeachment witnesses, they will not regret it in November.” You know, I gotta tell you, sir, this is a little bit different coming from you because I do want to get into, whether or not Mitch McConnell can actually make this happen, about limiting the witnesses and trying to get this done in two weeks. But rarely do I see you in the full on advocating for a position. Why do you come to this conclusion?

WAJ: Yeah. Hi Tony. I’ve come to the conclusion because this impeachment is completely in bad faith. They promised it before he was elected. They promised it after he was elected. They’ve been running through possible grounds to do it for over two years. So this is completely bad faith.

What they want to do here is just make this into a spectacle. They want to do what they did to Brett Kavanaugh during his hearings. They want to have the evidence come in and then when they don’t seem to be winning, they want to bring in more witnesses and they want to do this. They are trying to turn this into a circus.

This is not a good faith impeachment. And therefore the Senate is under no obligation to turn the floor of the Senate over to Adam Schiff and his crew. So I would say that, let them make their case, let the president’s lawyers make their case based on the record that’s been presented so far, and then either dismiss it as not satisfying the constitutional grounds for impeachment or go straight to an up or down vote, acquit or you know, guilty.

But there is no reason to allow Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler to turn this circus that they ran in the House into a circus in the Senate.

And I think people should be fed up with it. And I think if Republicans in the Senate stand firm on this and say, you had all the time you wanted to investigate this, you had all the time you wanted to subpoena witnesses and get court rulings, don’t come here and think that this nonsense is going to carry over to the Senate. I think there will be no political price for them to pay in November because the people who are against them are going to be against them no matter what.

But if they do not stand firm on this, I think they are really risking a disaster electorally because it will completely demoralize the people who would vote for Trump to see that Nancy Pelosi gets her way, not only in the House but also in the Senate.

KATZ: So in this conversation goes the idea that Mitt Romney is correct to limit opening statements and try and get this done before February 4th. He wants it all wrapped up before the State of the Union … That doesn’t take into consideration Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, possibly Ben Sasse, Susan Collins and possibly Mike Lee of Utah and others. So if you get to them, if Mitch McConnell has to convince these people to vote in a way to limit this opportunity, what happens if he doesn’t get them? If he doesn’t get those people? And if we get to witnesses, how long does this thing last?

WAJ: Well if Mitch McConnell can’t get it done. And I do recognize that when I’m advocating that this should be their position, I recognize there as there always are, are several very weak links in the Republican chain, and Susan Collins and Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and you only need one more. And they get four people, so I, I’m not sure they, they have the backbone to get it done given the nature of the Republican party in the Senate.

So I’m advocating they should get it done. I’m not saying that they necessarily will be able to, if this thing gets opened up, then there is going to be an endless stream of new demands from the Democrats. Just like there was with Kavanaugh. Remember first it was Ford, then it was Swetnick, then it was some anonymous person on a boat in Rhode Island and one after the other. It will never end.

And if the Republicans do try to finally cut it off, you will hear exactly the same arguments from the Democrats. Oh, we have more witnesses. We have new issues. What about Lev Parnas. What about emails? What about … it will never end. And when it does end, it will end exactly the same way. It could end in three or four days, which is Democrats claiming there’s a cover-up. So nothing will get done by simply appeasing the Democrats on this because they are not acting in good faith. This is not a good faith impeachment….

KATZ: So now I’m gonna play devil’s advocate with you. I don’t, I don’t usually get to do this. This is fun. William Jacobson, legal insurrection.com Cornell law professor. Is there a case to be made as you see it? And by the way, I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I’m with you. I just think it’s going to go the other way. But I’m with you and I appreciate the strong point and you make the great point that people hate you anyway. They’re going to hate you no matter what happens, unless everything goes their way and they’ll still hate you. Is there a case to be made that if you had witnesses and if you had, uh, other witnesses and you finally said, okay, we’re done here, you can say, wait a second. You called this witness, you called that witness. We had to stop you. We’re going to call witnesses for forever. Isn’t there a case that that could be helpful for the Republicans come 2020?

WAJ: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think are the Democrats going to go after Susan Collins next for any less vigorously, regardless of which way she votes on impeachment, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference. I think that they’re going to savage her no matter what. And I think what she needs to do is to keep the Republicans behind her. It’s her only chance of surviving 2020, politically. So I don’t think there’s a case to be made for that. When has it ever work to appease the most aggressive wing of the democratic party? I don’t think it has. And so I don’t see anything to be gained by that. Just like in the Brett Kavanaugh case there were a lot of people who were saying, you know, if, uh, Susan Collins votes for Kavanaugh, she’ll never get reelected. Well, she voted for Kavanaugh and she’s still in a good position for reelection. You never gain anything in these situations by appeasing the people who not just hate you, but want to destroy the Republican party,