WASHINGTON—On July 24, 1974, a congressman named Thomas Railsback leaned into the microphone in front of him on the broad, curving dais of the House Judiciary. Railsback was a Republican from Moline, Illinois. The issue before him that night was whether to vote to send to the full House of Representatives articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, a Republican from California who, at that moment, was the President of the United States. You could see the anguish on Railsback's face the way you can see the current still running in a river that is only thinly iced. "I wish," Railsback said in a ragged voice,"that the president could do something to absolve himself." Then, Tom Railsback, Republican of Illinois, voted "Yea" on all three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon.

I mention this bit of history only to illustrate how utterly and completely the Republican Party disgraced itself on Wednesday when Michael Cohen, the current president*'s former king fixer, sat before the House Oversight Committee to describe some of the garish and baroque offenses against the law and the republic committed by Donald Trump. There was not a single Railsback to be found. Not one Republican asked a question about the specific offenses that Cohen had illuminated in his opening statement.

Cohen sits to testify. Alex Wong Getty Images

Instead, they hammered away at Cohen's own crimes—which, of course, did nothing but remind the folks watching at home on whose behalf Cohen had told so many lies and paid off so many women. They spent great chunks of their time trying to get Cohen to promise he wouldn't sign a book deal after he gets out of the federal sneezer in three years. Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas told Cohen that any subsequent book deal would be "kind of sweet," as though he'd be willing to spend three years in a federal prison if an editor from Random House would be waiting on the day he got out.

Who was your favorite? Was it Paul Gosar of Arizona, the guy whose entire family made a commercial for his opponent the last time he ran? (Gosar struggled so long with the phrase, "pathological liar" that he gave Cohen to opportunity to ask,"Are you referring to me or to the president?") Was it jacketless Clay Higgins of Louisiana, who once filmed a campaign spot at Auschwitz? (Cohen mentioned at one point that he'd consulted some documents that were stored in boxes. Higgins demanded that a warrant be served on the boxes only to be told that Robert Mueller already had examined the contents and returned the boxes to Cohen. Unbelievably, these boxes came up again a few minutes later.)

Committee members sit in front of a tweet blown-up to mock Cohen.

Was it Bob Gibbs of Ohio, who seemed to drift away to Oz in the middle of his sentences, or Carol Miller of West Virginia, who was simply appalled at being a part of this when the committee could be discussing "neo-natal abstinence syndrome," a condition afflicting newborns due to their mother's drug use in utero? A worthy topic, surely, but hardly the provenance of the House Oversight Committee. And everybody kept yielding time to the egregious ranking Republican member, Jim Jordan of Ohio, or to Jordan's fellow Freedom Caucasian, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, and those two jamokes couldn't get out of their own way.

Jordan insisted that some dark—Dare he say, Clintonian?—forces were behind Cohen's testimony, using the name of Lanny Davis, the old Clinton hand who is Cohen's attorney, as a conjuring word. Jordan expressed surprise that Cohen might have consulted with the chairmen of other committees before which he might testify. He got so insufferable that Steve Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, went all Southie on Jordan's mug, running through a litany of people connected with the Trump campaign and/or the administration* who have been arrested, indicted, convicted, or copped a plea.

Alex Wong Getty Images

He went on:

For two years, you want to talk about an agenda, my friends on the other side refused to bring any of these people up before the committee. Today, for the first day, we have one witness who voluntarily is coming forward to testify. Your side ran away from the truth and we're trying to bring it to the American people.

This sent Jordan, who's been peddling the deep-state nonsense for two years now, into orbit. Comey! McCabe! Strzok! Page! Rosenstein! 25th Amendment! And this was the guy to whom The Cousin Nobody Likes, the collected probate court judges of the Confederate States of America, and Auschwitz Guy yielded their time.

As for Meadows, well, he thought he had something going with an item regarding contracts with foreign clients on a disclosure form that Cohen had signed, only to have Cohen point out that, contrary to Meadows's obvious reading deficits, the form referred only to foreign governments, for whom he had not worked. Meadows thundered away that Cohen was dodging the truth only to have a copy of the form pop up all over the Intertoobz in about 15 minutes, just long enough for Congresswoman Katie Hill to read it into the record and make Meadows look like a fool.

"You'd think they'd have had more than that," Steve Lynch said later. "I don't think any of them asked any questions about the possible criminal actions by the president."

He's right. None of them did, and only notable eccentric Justin Amash of Michigan shied away from trying to discredit Cohen.

Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan Tom Williams Getty Images

This was a vivid look into the chronic ward of the prion disease that has eaten away the higher functions of American conservatism—and, thus, those of the Republican Party as well—since Ronald Reagan first served up the monkey brains almost 40 years ago. These are the complete creatures of the talk-show culture, the perfect products of two and three generations of gerrymandered in-breeding. These are the monsters from inside The Bubble. You could see this moment coming during the Obama years, in which the country returned the two worst Congresses in American history, full to the gunwales with Bible-banging crazy people. Sooner or later, this was going to be all that was left, and it was going to have to confront a serious crisis with unserious people. That's what Wednesday was about.

As for Cohen, he gave as good as he got, and it was easy to forget for a moment what a bought-and-paid-for hoodlum he'd always been. He did the contrition dance deftly and, by and large, managed to stay cool under Meadows's provocation and Jordan's idiocies. He even did a better job debunking some of the alleged Trump misdeeds—love-children, the mysterious meeting in Prague—than the Republicans on the commitee bothered to do. There was something about him that yearned for the old days when he was sitting around Trump Tower with the boss, paying off porn stars and threatening high-school records offices. It would have been poignant if it wasn't all as sordid as the worst brothel on the Singapore docks.

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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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