To quote William F. Buckley, there are times "I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence." Also his: "I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said/wrote."

Only the just as truly partisan minds of the GOP in the U.S. Senate are preventing the conviction of Mr. Trump. The jokes and zero credibility accusations are as easily attributable to the McConnell minions.

The worst crime(s) involved within this entire fiasco is the almost blind partisanship of both parties.

"There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible."---Elliot Richardson

We sorely need an attorney general of integrity similar to Mr. Richardson.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0720.html

Excerpt: "It was Mr. Richardson's stand during Watergate when he was Richard M. Nixon's attorney general that was widely lauded as a special moment of integrity and rectitude that secured him a place in the nation's history. President Nixon ordered Mr. Richardson to fire Archibald M. Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, but Mr. Richardson chose to resign instead."

Uh...the house was the part where information is gathered, it's the part called the impeachment investigation...

The senate is the part where it's a trial, where the facts and testimony comes together in order to be fairly judged by the senate as a jury to that trial...

The GOP had every opportunity to witness and be a part of bringing evidence and facts to light, in fact its the white house and DOJ that is obstructing evidence...republicans could have voiced their objections to obstruction of justice, but they are a part of that.

When it comes to billionaires benefiting from the generosity of the American taxpayer, the holiday spirit is alive year-round. Taxpayers paid out $115m to Donald Trump so he could play golf at his own resorts.

And Amazon didn’t just pay zero in federal taxes on $11bn in profits – taxpayers gifted the corporation $129,000,000 in rebates. That’s enough to pay for CEO Jeff Bezos’s three apartments in Manhattan, including a penthouse, that cost him $80m.

And what about government generosity for those who actually need help? Tax dollars are somehow much harder to come by when they’re not going to handouts for the rich. The average person in poverty, struggling to put food on the table, gets about $134 a month in nutrition assistance.

Now, just in time for the holidays, Trump has finalized the first of three policies that will make this disparity even more obscene. Two years after passing a $1.5tn tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and large corporations, the Trump administration plans to strip 3.7 million people of their nutrition benefits.

The administration’s first step is to kick 700,000 adults off of nutrition assistance as they struggle to find work. The second step: trying to punish families who have high childcare and housing costs. And third, they want to hurt families who already are making difficult choices between food or heat.

Together, the three proposals will cut billions of dollars from one of our nation’s leading anti-poverty programs. Meanwhile, the Republican tax s**m is working exactly as planned. Today, the richest 400 billionaires pay lower taxes than any group in America – including the poor. Nearly 100 of the top Fortune 500 companies now pay nothing in taxes.

This is what oligarchy looks like: Trump’s appetite to shower the ultra-wealthy with corporate welfare is endless – and so is his administration’s willingness to assault our nation’s most vulnerable and hungriest families.

Republicans defend this by saying that keeping people hungry will make them work harder. But we know this is just about cruelty. We know that withholding food from needy people who are underemployed only deepens the crisis of poverty in America