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Tuesday, January 21, 2020

This Morning's Ridiculous Impeachment Claim

Per CNN:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to give House impeachment managers and President Donald Trump's legal team each 24 hours divided over two days for their opening arguments in the Senate's impeachment trial, a move that indicates Senate Republicans are pushing to finish the trial as quickly as possible ...

Emphasis mine.

The purpose of "opening arguments" -- actually "opening statements" -- in a trial is for the prosecution to describe what they're accusing the defendant of and summarize how they intend to prove it, and for the defense to describe why the prosecution is full of beans and summarize how they plan to show that.

One hour for each side might be a little short. Much more than that -- more than, say, splitting one eight-hour work day between the two sides -- isn't about opening statements, it's about intentionally dragging things out.

If the Democratic impeachment managers are smart, they'll wrap their opening statement up in less than two hours, making it clear that they have a slam-dunk case that they don't need 24 hours to summarize, then let the Republicans be the ones who bore America to death with two 12-hour days full of nothing but whining about how unfair it all is.

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