On Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes, et al, make an important observation regarding the public Michael Cohen hearings yesterday:
The second notable feature of the hearing was that it was really two hearings. One was a sometimes frustrating, sometimes incompetent, sometimes serious effort to learn what the committee could about the conduct of the man who currently serves as president of the United States. The other hearing alternated in five-minute increments with the first but was a different exercise entirely. It involved a confrontation between a man who had devoted a decade of his life to making Trump’s legal, ethical and personal problems go away—a man who once reveled in being dubbed Trump’s “fixer”—yet who now had become one of those problems, and was being confronted by a phalanx of 17 applicants for his old role.
Indeed, with the notable exception of Rep. Justin Amash, who engaged in a serious colloquy with Cohen about how Trump communicates indirect orders to his subordinates, none of the Republican members of the committee showed any serious interest in developing the factual record about the president’s conduct: not on matters related to L’Affaire Russe, not on payments to paramours, not on other corruption matters. They showed up, rather, as fixers—very much as Cohen himself would only recently have done. They were there merely to discredit the witness. And in this project they confronted a problem: It is actually hard to brand someone as a liar when he walks in, having recently pleaded guilty to any number of lies, and brands himself as a teller of untruths. There’s not much you can say about such a person that he hasn’t just said about himself.
It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? President Trump’s next right hand man might be one of those Republican House members, yet they haven’t the wit to look at the man in front of them and see themselves behind that table in a few years time – or behind a defendant’s table in a court of law.
And – more importantly – they seem to be stuck in political attack mode. Rather than take their jobs seriously, they simply defend their President from potentially devastating testimony from a man who is obviously at the heart of the alleged matter. Their roles should have been to ask tough questions in an attempt to discern whether Cohen is telling the truth now, evaluate accompanying evidence, and, if their dispassionately reached conclusion is that he’s telling the truth, then begin deciding the implications of the evidence.
Not, as one Rep whose name I did not catch, yelling “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” In a Nation less prone to drama, I’d feel the need to reprimand such childish behavior. As it is, his constituents should harbor serious concerns about his judgment.
I suppose the title of this post is a misnomer, though: the morality of the GOP these days is “Whatever is good for President Trump.” That is how cults often roll. And the behavior of the GOP Reps corresponds – with the exception of Rep Amash, as Wittes notes – very well with cult members. And it makes it hard for independents, like myself, to take them seriously on an intellectual level.
