"The clamor is growing for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to take an assertive stance in presiding over the impeachment trial of President Trump."

"... Roberts took the appropriate step, after midnight on the first day of the trial, of admonishing the House managers and the president’s lawyers to tone down the rhetoric.... Is Roberts supposed to instruct them to get back in their seats, or else? Come on. This is the U.S. Senate, not a kindergarten class. The chief justice is not there to take attendance... Charles P. Pierce of Esquire [wants Roberts to]  'Be the umpire' [and accuse the President's lawyers of lying].... This seems like the slipperiest of slopes. The chief justice is going to interrupt the trial to question the veracity of arguments being made by the president’s lawyers? Where would this stop? If it started, wouldn’t the chief justice open himself — and, by extension, the court — to claims, in this trial or, heaven forbid, the next, that he is putting his thumb on the scale for one side or the other? There is a difference between enforcing standards of decorum and opining on matters of substance...."

Writes Ruth Marcus in "A more assertive John Roberts would be a bad idea" (WaPo).

Pierce's idea is obviously horrible, but that has to do with intruding on the role of the Senators, who must decide things like who is lying. It would be easy to enforce the rules of decorum — the Senate's own rules about keeping quiet and remaining seated — without switching to making statements about which of the speakers are lying! Yet Marcus visualizes Roberts tumbling down "the slipperiest of slopes." That's one of the worst "slippery slope" arguments I have ever seen.

For background on the behavior of the Senators, see "Sen. Rand Paul works on crossword puzzle, paper airplane during impeachment trial" (Courier-Journal). The article is not just about Rand Paul (who also held up a piece of paper with "S.O.S." written on it). We also hear about Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., apparently sleeping, and Elizabeth Warren playing some sort of "game on paper." Some Senators are "reading non-impeachment materials." (Wouldn't you bring a book?) And then there's the open laughing, such as when "Adam Schiff said he’d only speak for 10 minutes." And when one of the lesser prosecutors got up to speak, it was, apparently, a cue for Senators to "bolt[] for the cloak rooms, where their phones are stored." Some Senators have taken to standing rather than the required sitting. Yawning is seen.

Should Roberts do something about this behavior? You make the call:

Should Roberts do something about this behavior?

Yes. He's presiding. He should preside like a trial judge and require decorum.

No. It's a slippery slope. If he starts, he may end up calling out the liars.

Yes, and he should feel free to go all the way and call out speakers who are lying.

No. Let Senators follow their own standards of behavior, violating their own rules if they like.

 

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"[T]he authoritarian rot that produced the current president* is present in the Republican Party at all levels.... And, if you need further proof, take a jaunt with us up to Wisconsin..."

"... where the voters had the audacity to vote in Tony Evers, a Democrat, and turn out Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage that particular midwest subsidiary. Democratic success in elections, unless it is achieved by overwhelming margins, is in the eyes of Republicans prima facie illegitimate. It started with Bill Clinton and it’s gotten worse ever since...."

From "The Authoritarian Rot That Produced This President* Is Present in the Republican Party at All Levels/Need proof? Look at Kentucky and Wisconsin" by Charles P. Pierce (in Esquire).

The asterisk doesn't have a footnote to go with it. Maybe Pierce established in some earlier column that when he refers to "the current president" there's some reservation, but it would be weird if the idea is that he doesn't regard Trump as actually the President, since in this column, he's taking the position that Democrats who win an election (without an overwhelming majority) are not considered legitimate by Republicans.

What's the "authoritarian rot" that's so obvious in Wisconsin, according to Pierce? It's just one story about how the state senate voted not to confirm the governor's choice for the state agriculture secretary, Brad Pfaff. The GOP senators said Pfaff's manure storage rules would hurt farmers. The governor (a Democrat) accused the GOP senators of — in the words of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — "punishing Pfaff for sticking up for farmers and publicly criticizing Republicans who control the Legislature for holding back suicide prevention funds."

That all sounds very obscure but how is it "authoritarian," let alone "authoritarian rot"? The governor's choice for agriculture secretary required senate confirmation. That's a check on executive power. Where's the authoritarian rot Pierce is talking about?

Evers, the state's chief executive doesn't seem to be authoritarian. He's disappointed to lose Pfaff and can only complain about how badly the other party's legislators treated him. The resort of public complaining reminds me of Trump. Evers worried about his other appointments and whether these people would get negative votes from the senate if they spoke: "If I was a total cynic I'd say, 'Keep your damn mouth shut,' but I'm not. I want them to be forthcoming. I want them to be professional. That's why we hired them. To think that they're going to have to keep their mouth shut for the next, who knows — four years — in order to get approved by this Senate, this is just absolute bullshit."

It's funny to use "bullshit" when the controversy is (arguably) over manure storage rules. And Pierce didn't resist making an overt shit joke:

[The Republican senators said] Pfaff had put in place new manure storage rules that would hurt the state’s farmers. (This ignores the fact that the largest manure storage unit in Wisconsin is the building in which they work in Madison, but we digress.)

Conundrum of the Day.

So if Nancy Pelosi, as @CharlesPPierce so eloquently argues here, is violating the solemn oath she swore and is refusing to perform the duties required her of the US Constitution, shouldn't she be impeached? https://t.co/fCp5Bgx5di

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 12, 2019

Technical point: Removal would be by expulsion, not impeachment, and it would be done by a 2/3 vote of the House acting alone.

Of course, it's not a serious proposal. It's not possible to remove members of Congress on such a sensitive standard of what it means to be "violating the solemn oath." Who would be left?

On a subtler level, I don't think Nancy Pelosi is violating her oath in ruling out impeachment. There's discretion in deciding when to go forward on impeachment, even if there is an impeachable offense. She's simply exercising her discretion, and I'd say she's even doing that well. What I like about Greenwald's wisecrack is that it supports the decision not to impeach Trump, not that I think Greenwald intended to do that.

"It Might Be Time to Start Fireproofing the Reichstag/Ruth Bader Ginsburg's absence signals our last line of defense is in peril."

Writes Charles P. Pierce in Esquire.

It's time for everyone to start getting used to the fact that, unless some massive legal apocalypse intervenes, the president is going to get at least one more nominee for the United States Supreme Court and that, barring a sudden desire to keep the republic from turning entirely to guacamole, the Senate is going to rubber-stamp Justice Wingnut McWingnutty onto the Court for the next 40 years.....

[And Trump] has announced that he will give a Big Boy speech on TV Tuesday night, which will be followed by his taking his unending road show to the border on Thursday because that's just what the border needs. He can go there because there is no emergency....

ADDED: I looked up how old Pierce is because I was thinking that there's got to be some age limit on humor like "Justice Wingnut McWingnutty" and "republic turning... to guacamole." I'd recommend moving on to a better level of sophistication certainly before leaving college. Pierce is 65!

Charles P. Pierce re Bobby Jindal: "Please Punch This Man in the Dick."

Sexualized violence... it's funny because...? Exactly why is it funny to you Charles?

Multiple answers permitted: Pierce thinks this sexualized violence is funny because...

Jindal is a Republican.

Sexualized violence against men is not something that requires empathy.

Dicks are inherently funny, whatever happens to them.

Jindal asked for it.

The "please" makes it funny.

It's funny that people click and link to this, like Althouse just now.

 

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"To single out the Clintons for having wealthy friends who might want favors later, especially in the political context brought to us by the destruction of campaign finance regulations..."

"... is a particularly laughable application of the Clinton Rules which, like the Voting Rights Act and McCain-Feingold, have been rendered irrelevant by Citizens United and its unholy progeny."

Writes Charles Pierce at Esquire in a piece titled "The Return To Mena Airport: It Begins Again/In which we learn that rich people like the Clintons have lots of money."

I copied that sentence because it's such a mess of a sentence, almost as much of a jumble as that title. (Do you remember Mena Airport? Mena-ither.) I don't know how disordered the mind of Charles Pierce really is. I'm sure his style amuses the people it amuses, and I assume those people are people who respond to Citizens United!!!!

But Pierce's invocation of the much-invoked case name comes in a context of very specific misrepresentation of the meaning of that case. Citizens United and its "unholy progeny" involve judges doing judicial work — saying what rights are and putting constitutional law in its proper place in the hierarchy of law, above statutes.

We could talk about whether we agree with the interpretation of the First Amendment in those cases, in which the Supreme Court has invalidated some statutory restrictions on spending money to propagate political speech, but that's not what Pierce is talking about. He's not talking about how statutes and constitutional law are sorted out by judges in court cases. He's talking about the political debate among us, The People. A candidate's wealth and how it was acquired and whether he might be beholden to some interests or even corrupt are going to be issues as we decide whether we want to vote for that candidate. Citizens United and its "unholy progeny" don't say we voters shouldn't concern ourselves with such things. In fact, Citizens United makes a point of upholding disclosure requirements, so that voters get more information about where money is coming from:

"As the cable shows signed off last night, it was dawning even on the most conventional pundits that the Republicans had not elected an escadrille of Republican archangels..."

"... to descend upon Capitol Hill. It was more like a murder of angry crows. Joni Ernst is not a moderate. David Perdue is not a moderate. Thom Tillis is not a moderate. Cory Gardner -- who spiced up his victory by calling himself 'the tip of the spear' -- is not a moderate. Tom Cotton is not a moderate. And these were the people who flipped the Senate to the Republicans. In the reliably Republican states, Ben Sasse in Nebraska is not a moderate.  James Lankford in Oklahoma is not a moderate. He's a red-haired fanatic who believes that welfare causes school shootings. Several of these people -- most notably, Sasse and Ernst -- won Republican primaries specifically as Tea Partiers, defeating establishment candidates. The Republicans did not defeat the Tea Party. The Tea Party's ideas animated what happened on Tuesday night. What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net. They did nothing except send the Tea Party to finishing school."

Wrote Esquire's Charles P. Pierce, live-blogging the election results. I note that he called Scott Walker "the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin."

Yes, it's interesting to go back and relive Tuesday night from the perspective of someone who — we know in retrospect — is going to get deeply wounded.

A few stray observations about Pierce's style of humor:

1. Why is "red-haired" considered acceptable as an insult?

2. Why is it considered okay to call attention to what seems to be an eye disorder? Whether something is wrong with Scott Walker's eyes or not, the epithet "goggle-eyed" is disrespectful to all of the people who suffer from conditions like esotropia.

3. To speak of teaching the Tea Party "to wear shoes" is to try to be funny by evoking the stereotype of barefoot hillbillies. When will elite urban white people ever get the feeling that it's bigoted to mock rural white people? Oh, the answer is easy. You can find it in the book title "What's the matter with Kansas"? There's something wrong with these people as long as they fail to vote for Democrats.

(By the way, "escadrille" is how you say "squadron" or "small squadron" in French. I'll refrain from adding an anti-French kicker, given my attention to political correctness above.)

Charles P. Pierce — who "back[s] up to nobody in my respect and love for The Master" — is irked that somebody else is writing about Bob Dylan.

"Songs of his I could not understand in my youth mean more to me now than a lot of Scripture does," but when he reads Elizabeth Wurtzel expressing all manner of reverence for Dylan, Pierce shifts to being one of the many here among us who feel that Dylan is but a joke. "Desolation Row" —  for just this one moment — becomes "one of the great stand-up comedy routines." Because nothing's funnier than a heart-attack machine.

"John Lewis tells you something about voting rights and you say, yes, sir, and you shut the fk up."

Charles Pierce pithily dictates the sole method of showing respect. 

But actually, ironically, that kind of respect entails massive disrespect. You say yes and you shut the fuck up in his presence, and that means the only way people can have a serious back-and-forth debate on the subject is if they exclude John Lewis.

***

Pierce has a nice sidebar at his blog under the heading "About this blog." I read it for the first time, by chance, just now. The penultimate sentence is:

It will be the belief of this blog that, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the only correct answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is "No."

Esquire's blogger Charles P. Pierce purports to instruct me: "For the record, writers do not write their own headlines."

He writes: "Thanks for the link, but, seriously, I know there are better things to do in Wisconsin than to be this publicly dim."

Typical lefty response, to call your opponent stupid. But:

1. Hello? Pierce? You're writing a blog. Bloggers write their own post titles. You can call yourself a "writer" and call your post title a "headline," but I presume if I'm looking at a real blogger, you write your own post title.

"Tony Scalia's Retirement Has Started Early."

Says Charles P. Pierce on the Esquire website.

Calling a man of Italian ancestry "Tony" when that isn't his nickname? Isn't that on the level of calling a Latino "Jose" or a black man "Leroy" (or some such stereotypical name)?

Of course, quite aside from that, the blog post is bilge:

I think Justice Antonin Scalia isn't even really trying any more. It's been clear for some time now that he's short-timing his job on the Supreme Court. The job bores him....  he's now bringing Not Giving A Fuck to an almost operatic level.

Opera... see? That's like talking about a black person and throwing in watermelon.

His "originalism" was always a shuck, even if it was consistent, which it rarely was, and even if it was principled, which it never was.... But at least, for a while, he actually tried to act like a judge in a democratic republic, and not the lost Medici pope. 

Pope? More anti-Italian (and anti-Catholic) stereotyping crap, which Pierce probably thinks is just fine, indeed hilarious, because it's against a conservative.

It is plain now that Scalia simply doesn't like the Affordable Care Act on its face.... He doesn't think that the people who would benefit from the law deserve to have a law that benefits them. On Tuesday, he pursued the absurd "broccoli" analogy... And today, apparently, he ran through every twist and turn in the act's baroque political history in an attempt to discredit the law politically, rather than as a challenge to its constitutionality. (What in hell does the "Cornhusker Kickback" — yet another term of art that the Justice borrowed from the AM radio dial — have to do with the severability argument? Is Scalia seriously making the case that a banal political compromise within the negotiations from which bill eventually is produced can affect its ultimate constitutionality? Good luck ever getting anything passed if that's the standard.)

Pierce just doesn't understand what the Cornhusker Kickback has to do with the severability argument. He smears Scalia, but he doesn't do the basic work of fathoming the argument. He denounces without earning the right to denounce, and instead of saying anything of any value about law he flips out over into the ethnic insults.

Here's the portion of the severability argument — transcript PDF — where Scalia talks about the Cornhusker Kickback:

"God Bless America and the Anthem? And the fly-by? Could you militarize this event just a tad more?"

"And what in the name of the FSM was the point of giving us both Sam Elliott and Michael Douglas for the pregame Heroic Voiceover Brigade? And, Michael Douglas, how exactly do we link JFK's inaugural, MLK's Dream speech, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, Ali's KO of Liston in Lewiston, and this football game? A journey? More like a trip, actually. The pregame show was what Leni Riefenstahl would have done had she emigrated here as a child and gone to work for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price."

So wrote Charles P. Pierce about the Super Bowl intro, and I almost didn't post that because I had to check the Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price reference  — is it "Mad Men"? yeah, sorry, I still don't want to watch it — not to mention the FSM reference — eh. It flicked my bloggable toggle switch and then came very close to toggling back. But I'm quoting it, really because I agree that they overdid it. Leni would have been much more insidiously subtle. But that's a good thing, right? You can defend against the ridiculously overdone. We can feel patriotic and festive in a mixed up clutter of history and pop culture, and then it's on to the football game.

The Pierce quote is embedded in this James Wolcott blog post. Wolcott is crankier than Pierce:

I had the pre-game on mute and every time I glanced up I wondered if we had declared war on Iraq or a hologram of Ronald Reagan was going to materialize on stage, raising a ruddy hand in blessing as Peggy Noonan ascended into heaven. The Super Bowl is bombastic enough without being a fanfare for World War III or IV, but who's counting? Or is it that the country requires this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile? Maybe Stanley Fish can figure this out for us.

No link on the Stanley Fish reference, which is not something I can untangle with a Google search. I know who Stanley Fish is. I'm even in the middle of reading his new book, "How to Write a Sentence." (Check it out: I just wrote a sentence!) I'll assume Wolcott means to say something like: All those words and images require interpretation and Fish is the interpretation-meister.

But let's try to answer Wolcott's question: Does the country require this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile?

I anticipate, instead of real answers, your snarky reframings of the question, asking whether Wolcott needs to reassure himself that he's still proud and virile. Indeed, I got the impression that his paragraph paralleled Pierce's, that he was envious of Pierce's writing prowess and trying to outmatch it. Ending with that limp Fish, he failed, which probably explains the flailing about "the county" and its imagined self-esteem problem. It's so problematic, raising the flag.