I MISS RINGLING BARNUM.

In the absence of The Greatest Show on Earth, all we have is the impeachment "Hey Rube!"  Power Line's Steven Hayward watches it, so you don't have to.

The second “tell” of the week are the two articles of impeachment themselves. As Andy McCarthy notes, they are exceedingly weak: an improper use of power in his Ukraine phone call, and obstruction of the congressional investigation. That’s it? That’s all they got? Why only two?

Or, to put it more crudely, the first article accuses the president of prospectively rigging the 2020 election, something that the Democrats could laugh off, simply by nominating a sufficiently strong candidate.  The second article accuses the president of requiring Congress to make a case for requesting the documents they believe are incriminating.  I recall suffering through a year and a half of Watergate inquiries, and much of that time was taken up in Congress requesting, the president saying no, counsel for Congress going to court, Judge Sirica ruling, counsel for the president appealing, ad infinitum, or at least for two summers.

[O]ne reason for limiting impeachment to these two weak items is that it makes it more likely the Republican Senate will make quick work of the matter and perhaps even dismiss the case on Day One of the Senate trial. Chief Justice Roberts won’t even have to skip lunch that day. And this becomes a political weapon for the Democrats for the election, where they are desperate to regain control of the Senate. They will tie every Republican senator who votes to dismiss impeachment to Trump. I’ve thought all along that Senate election politics played as big a role in the calculations and timing of impeachment as any of Trump’s actual deeds.

Here, too, the Senate becomes that saucer for cooling the overheated tea from the cup of the House.  There are Republican true believers who would like to put the whole California Democrat delegation and their Deep State useful idiots in the dock, but apparently the Senate is having none of that.

If the House had included additional impeachment counts, it would put pressure on the Senate for a longer and more substantive trial. Here’s where the two weak charges become another “tell” that Democrats are bluffing and playing pure politics. Do Democrats want a longer Senate trial? Ask yourself this: if the Senate holds a three or four-week trial starting in January, requiring the silent attendance of all senators (as the Senate rules stipulate), what happens to the presidential campaigns of Warren, Klobuchar, Booker, and Sanders? You know they want to be pounding the pavement in Iowa and New Hampshire, and not sitting silently in the Senate chamber. This is one reason Cocaine Mitch ought to threaten a long, six-day a week trial starting three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, just to see how Democrats respond. And then start spreading the word that impeachment is actually a DNC plot to smooth the way for Joe Biden’s nomination, just as the DNC tilted the playing field for Hillary against Bernie in 2016. Fun times!

Lastly, there is the question of whether the Senate ought to have a trial in which they call Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff, the “anonymous” whistleblower, and others as witnesses. Trump is said to favor this, while Mitch McConnell is said to be against it in favor of getting the whole thing over with quickly. He may be right about this, but it is certainly worth deploying his own very good poker face to suggest that just maybe the Senate will call on the Bidens for an accounting of things.

Had anybody told me six years ago that I might be nostalgic for the days of wrangling over the debt ceiling, I would likely have been surprised.