On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee started its impeachment proceedings, with four legal experts testifying on the constitutional viability of the charges against Donald Trump. The ranking Republican on the committee is Georgia’s Doug Collins, who gave a ludicrous opening statement that there are no such things as facts, and that the legal experts being questioned today would just confuse everyone with their legal talk. He also used his time to offer up backhanded attacks on the legal experts, saying they were professors at colleges and universities, more interested in theories than in actual evidence presented against Trump. He wondered aloud how much these experts could speak to the evidence presented at the public impeachment hearings in previous weeks.
Pamela Karlan is a professor of law at the Stanford Law School. She has a serious person’s resume—something that most ranking Republicans do not have. She has worked on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is one of the leading attorneys on voting rights in the country. She took exception to Rep. Collins’ weak-sauce dismissal of her expertise in her opening remarks to the committee.
PROF: PAMELA KARLAN: Today you are being asked to consider whether protecting those elections requires impeaching a president. That is an awesome responsibility. That everything I know about our Constitution and its values, and my review of the evidentiary record, and here, Mr. Collins, I would like to say to you, sir, that I read transcripts of every one of the witnesses who appeared in the live hearing because I would not speak about these things without reviewing the facts, so I'm insulted by the suggestion that, as a law professor, I don't care about those facts.
But everything I read on those occasions tells me that when President Trump invited, indeed, demanded, foreign involvement in our upcoming election, he struck at the very heart of what makes this a republic to which we pledge allegiance. That demand as professor Feldman just explained, constituted an abuse of power. Indeed, as I want to explain in my testimony, drawing a foreign government into our elections is an especially serious abuse of power because it undermines democracy itself.
Collins looked as if he wanted to respond but thought better of getting verbally and intellectually smacked about on live television. Karlan went on to methodically illustrate the historical imperative of impeachment. She pointed to George Washington and other Founding Fathers so lionized by GOP bullshit artists, all of whom would probably jail Donald Trump for his actions 1,000 times over. You can watch Karlan’s opening statement below. As usual, Republicans on the committee are outmatched and outclassed.