There’s some comedy amidst the solemnity of the Trump impeachment trial, as I noted at New York:

If there was any collegial friendship likely to blossom when Kelly Loeffler was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, it was with Utah’s Mitt Romney. After all, according to a 2013 interview with Atlanta magazine, Loeffler’s husband Jeff Sprecher had very warm things to say of Mitt by way of explaining the couple’s combined $1.6 million contribution to Romney’s 2012 presidential effort:

Sprecher: [W]e met Mitt Romney and got to know him personally many, many years ago, when he was trying to run in the primaries against John McCain [in 2008]. We met him at a neighbor’s house here in Atlanta when people didn’t really know who he was and he was just exploring whether he could even run. We got to know him and his wife, and have been to his house many times and they’ve been to our house. Taking politics off the table, the Romneys are really lovely people, and well intended. We’d never known anybody that was running for president and actually had a friendship with them! And so it was easy to support a friend. [Turns to Loeffler] Is that fair?

Loeffler: Sure.

So it’s eyebrow-raising that Loeffler went after that “lovely” person today after Mitt expressed an interest in hearing what John Bolton had to say about President Trump and Ukraine:

Appease the left? Romney wants to hear testimony from a famously right-wing Republican foreign policy expert who occupied high-ranking positions in the administrations of three Republican presidents. I have no doubt that if Mitt had won in 2012, Bolton would have been in another high-ranking position (he joined Loeffler in endorsing Romney’s candidacy after mulling his own that year). And the idea that Utah’s junior senator needs to “appease the left” for purposes of being reelected back home is hilarious on multiple counts.

Loeffler’s ongoing effort to rebrand herself from a self-funding moderate that Governor Kemp hoped would appeal to suburban women to a wild partisan of the president’s is the real factor here. And it’s clear why this is happening, too: Loeffler faces a potential 2020 special jungle-primary election in which congressman Doug Collins — one of Trump’s favorite House impeachment pit bulls, and the Senate aspirant Trump pushed Kemp to appoint before he picked Loeffler — is considering a run with loud MAGA backing. In fact, Collins’s allies in Georgia are sponsoring legislation to force Loeffler to run in a regular Republican primary in May, which would not give the little-known, first-time candidate much time to build her ideological street cred.

So Loeffler is fighting the clock to get right with the GOP’s warrior-king so he doesn’t noisily back (or encourage his fans to noisily back) a challenge to her. And if that means shivving old friend Mitt Romney, well, that’s just a token of her understanding that Donald Trump is a jealous god who accepts no competing loyalties.

Just before the Iowa Caucuses occur, there’s always a crescendo of criticism of the presidential nominating process. But reforming it isn’t easy, as I explained at New York:

Perhaps it’s unhappiness with the winter weather in Iowa and New Hampshire, or more credible concern about the demographics of these two largely white states (offset, to some extent, a few cycles ago with the addition of Nevada and South Carolina to the ranks of protected early states). But whatever it is you can count on alternative proposals of various seriousness. Today we have one tested in a new Monmouth University poll:

“Nearly six in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents questioned in a new Monmouth University survey supported dramatically changing the current system of choosing their party’s presidential nominee.

“Given a list of four options, 58 percent of those questioned say they’d rather a single national primary be held where every state holds its primary or caucus on the same day.

“Only 11 percent called for keeping the calendar in its current form, with Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina holding the first four contests ahead of the rest of the country. Fifteen percent want to modify the current calendar, by letting a few other states vote on the same days as Iowa and New Hampshire. And one in 10 say they want to see grouped state primaries.”

Great, a single national primary day. There’s only one problem: How are you going to do that?

Such polls — and for that matter, a lot of the commentary devoted to kvetching about Iowa and New Hampshire specifically or the nominating process generally — seem premised on the entirely erroneous presumption that we have a national system imposed by the Democratic National Committee deploying some sort of fiat powers. What we actually have is a set of nominating contests created, run, and financed by state legislatures and state parties with the DNC keeping things relatively organized via carrots and sticks. When it comes to the calendar, it’s not a system at all. It’s a loose framework based on what the states (in many cases legislatures controlled by the opposing party) can be talked and nudged into doing.

A complete overhaul could be accomplished, presumably, by some sort of interstate compact, though those generally take a good while to enact, and again, differences in the values and constituencies of the two parties would complicate everything. And the kind of one-day national primary the Monmouth poll finds so much support for would be particularly difficult, since some states prefer to hold their presidential and regular state primaries on the same day. Finding one that works for so many different contests in so many places may be impossible.

This particular “reform,” moreover, has its own perils. If you were to hold a one-day national primary right now, the odds-on favorite might well be Michael Bloomberg, the candidate whose ability to spend literally billions on his campaign could make him unbeatable in a landscape that broad, wide, and simultaneous. Is sticking it to Iowa and New Hampshire, or getting it all over with quickly, worth that risk?

The thing to do (which Democrats have done in the past — including the immediate past — to incrementally reform the nominating process) is to set up a reform initiative immediately following the current contest, when it’s more practicable and less likely to serve the interests of a single candidate. If it finds overwhelming and urgent support for a major change, it would have time to help draw up a framework and design a path to its adoption.

But make no mistake: Working around the edges of the current system will be a lot easier than adopting some grandiose scheme. And if you are going to directly take on Iowa and New Hampshire, you’d best build yourself a large coalition of states prepared to go to war because otherwise the early state folk will beat you to a long list of allies.

The Vice President of the United States penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that motivated some acerbic commentary from me at New York:

[Pence’s] basic thrust is to call on Senate Democrats to defect from the party line to vindicate the unfairly persecuted Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, the way Edmond Ross broke with his fellow Republicans in 1868 to cast the crucial vote to acquit the equally persecuted Andrew Johnson. Very likely, what led him to this argument is the fact that Ross got a chapter in then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1956 book Profiles in Courage, which gives Pence’s case a bipartisan veneer, however anachronistic. And so the veep tries to use this analogy to divert attention from the pressure on Republican senators today to break party ranks and allow a real impeachment trial:

“Then as now, a political faction has forced a partisan impeachment through the House in the heat of an argument over a difference in policy. Then as now, this faction has cheapened the impeachment process, which the Founders believed should be reserved for only the most grave abuses of the public trust.

“But despite the focus on what a handful of Republican senators may do, the true profile in courage, as Kennedy understood it, would be a Senate Democrat willing to stand up and reject a partisan impeachment passed by the Democrat-controlled House.”

As it happens, I agree with Pence that Trump is a lot like Andrew Johnson, and the case for impeaching both men has striking similarities. But neither of these crude, self-centered leaders with racist tendencies should be understood as any kind of martyr, as I noted when impeachment proceedings against Trump began:

“Johnson entered office as something of a figure of scandal, having delivered an inaugural address inside the Capitol in a very apparent state of inebriation (‘Do not let Johnson speak outside,’ Lincoln reportedly said before the public inaugural address that many consider his own greatest speech).

“Johnson also anticipated Trump in the violent abusiveness of his rhetoric toward political enemies….Among other things, Johnson called for ‘hanging’ his chief congressional Republican critic, Thaddeus Stevens, and abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips. According to prevailing standards of the day, Johnson held the functional equivalent of MAGA rallies.”

The most important similarity, though, is that Johnson systematically sought to “make America great again” by undermining congressional efforts to vindicate the sacrifices of the Civil War by extending the franchise to ex-slaves. So total were Johnson’s efforts to restore (to use the great Democratic slogan of that day) “the Union as it was and the Constitution as it is” that his erstwhile congressional colleagues struggled to find specific grounds to impeach a president engaged in the most dramatic counterrevolution in U.S. history, as The Atlantic’s Yoni Applebaum recently observed:

“The question facing Congress, and the public, was this: What do you do with a president whose every utterance and act seems to undermine the Constitution he is sworn to uphold? At first, Republicans pursued the standard mix of legislative remedies — holding hearings and passing bills designed to strip the president of certain powers. Many members of Johnson’s Cabinet worked with their congressional counterparts to constrain the president. Johnson began to see conspiracies around every corner. He moved to purge the bureaucracy of his opponents, denouncing the “blood-suckers and cormorants” who frustrated his desires.

“It was the campaign of white-nationalist terror that raged through the spring and summer of 1866 that persuaded many Republicans they could not allow Johnson to remain in office.”

In Pence’s account, Johnson was properly acquitted on contrived charges that he violated a statute subsequently deemed unconstitutional, the Tenure of Office Act. That’s only partially true at best. The 11th article of impeachment, the one against which Ross first voted in his “profile in courage,” also cited Johnson’s defiance of congressional Reconstruction generally, and of properly enacted laws regarding the military chain of command in the South that Johnson circumvented. Beyond that, in the context of the time the Tenure of Office Act was an important restraint on Johnson’s efforts to restore white supremacy in the former rebel states, as I noted early in the current impeachment saga:

“Because it was triggered by his effort to get rid of Edward Stanton just as the Secretary of War was deploying military force to halt ex-Confederate terrorism, [the Tenure of Office Act reflected] Johnson’s determination to fight for white supremacy. In that sense, it was similar to the apparent inclination of today’s House Democrats to impeach Trump for doing something equally illustrative of his overall pattern of lawlessness: using presidential powers to encourage a foreign government to drop a hammer on a domestic political threat.”

As Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy maintains, the real basis for removing Johnson from office was clear:

“[T]here was only one true Johnson scandal, just as there is only one true Trump scandal, and though the particulars are very different — the former’s class resentment was the inverse of the latter’s class entitlement — they share a common element: an open hostility to democratic ideals. That was Andrew Johnson’s high crime, and there was nothing conspiratorial or nitpicky about it. He was doing it in plain sight. The rest was noise.”

If Andrew Johnson was no persecuted defender of the Constitution, nor was Edmond Ross a courageous man of principle. As David Greenberg explained during the Clinton trial when people were touting Ross’s example, he was far more interested in patronage graft than in resisting legislative abrogation of executive powers:

“Ross’ vote wasn’t the lone act of bravery it was later made out to be. At least four other senators were prepared to oppose conviction had their votes been needed — a fact that has been forgotten, maybe, because it doesn’t square with the High Noon portrait of Ross as the man of principle facing down the mob.

“Ross wasted no time exploiting Johnson’s debt to him. On June 6, he wrote to Johnson to have him install one of his cronies as southern superintendent of Indian affairs, and Johnson agreed to oust his own friend in order to comply. Sensing opportunity, Ross kept upping the ante, like a Mafia henchman running a protection racket.”

There is one aspect of Pence’s argument that rings true: He is advancing a view of Johnson and Ross, and of the Reconstruction issues underlying the impeachment effort, that was common in 1956, when Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage (or more accurately, co-wrote with his famous ghostwriter Ted Sorenson). It’s the great myth that Johnson and white southerners were equally victims of a corrupt and extremist Radical Republican regime centered in Congress that sought to put carpetbaggers and ignorant ex-slaves in power over a supine region powerless to resist (though resist they did, through the enactment of violently discriminatory Black Codes and the white terror of the Ku Klux Klan). It’s the myth — best expressed in the racist classic Birth of a Nation — that justified the eventual disenfranchisement of black voters and the imposition of Jim Crow.

Jim Crow, of course, was still in place in 1956 when JFK and Sorenson wrote their misguided tribute to Ross. Whole generations of historians have debunked the myth that Pence now embraces. He may yet regret drawing parallels between the 17th and 45th presidents, and not just because there were aspects of Johnson’s defense that Team Trump wouldn’t for a moment emulate, like agreements to hear 41 witnesses. Johnson deserved removal from office for one of the greatest “high crimes and misdemeanors” in U.S. history, the betrayal of ex-slaves and the cause of equality under the law embodied by the first great Civil Rights Act of 1866, which he vetoed on grounds that equality discriminated against white people.

There is in fact only one relevant difference between Johnson and Trump: The former was a spent force by the time he was acquitted, soon unsuccessfully seeking a second-term nomination by Democrats who met under the slogan, “This is a white man’s party; let a white man rule.” Trump’s renomination is assured. So far, few in his party have had the courage to speak out against him — and certainly not Mike Pence.

After the seventh Democratic presidential candidates’ debate, I called at New York for the turning of a corner:

[A]s the voting phase of the nominating process approaches, and the field of candidates inevitably continues to shrink, it’s time for the practical part of the debate discussions to grow a lot larger, as legal expert Jeffrey Toobin suggested earlier this week at the New Yorker:

“The Democratic debates so far have featured detailed discussions of the candidates’ competing health-care plans—none of which is likely to become law in any form close to what’s so far been described…. But one thing we know for sure is that, if a Democrat wins the White House this year, he or she will be responsible for appointing federal judges, including a few likely vacancies on the Supreme Court.”

Yes, that subject did come up in the October debate, but even then it was more about visionary ideas of how to reshape SCOTUS to protect cherished rights via court-packing or terms limits or some other unlikely-to-be-enacted scheme. More specific, short-term plans are more relevant. Will the candidates, for example, emulate Trump’s politically smart approach of setting up a vetting process for prospective SCOTUS candidates and a list of potential nominees before the 2020 election cycle ends? Bernie Sanders recently said in an interview that he’d “consider” doing that, even before the nominating contest is over. Let’s hear more about that from him and from his rivals. But that’s not the only question, even on judges: how will the candidate deal with such nominations if Republicans continue to control the Senate, which at present is more likely than not? And will she or he devote some real political capital to legal fights in the state and lower courts where reproductive rights, health care protections, treatment of immigrants, and other key issues are being litigated every single day?

As Toobin points out, a coalition of progressive groups focused on such issues (including the Demand Justice Initiative, the Center for Reproductive Rights and NARAL Pro-Choice America) are sponsoring a presidential forum (not a debate, but a series of candidate interviews) on February 8 in New Hampshire. That’s the day after the eighth official candidate debate, and just three days before the New Hampshire primary. It will be a great opportunity to get into real detail on each candidate’s perspective on constitutional rights, SCOTUS, and the judiciary generally. But this questions should be on the agenda wherever candidates gather.

The judiciary isn’t the only practical issue that needs more airing before the primary ends. Given the many structural obstacles to the enactment of progressive policies in Congress, with or without Democratic majorities, candidates need to be pressed on their “theories of change,” their strategies for overcoming entrenched opposition, whether it’s Amy Klobuchar’s focus on executive orders or Elizabeth Warren’s belief that an anti-corruption push can break the power of lobbyists. The health care and climate change arenas are both high-priority areas in which there simply aren not and won’t automatically be working majorities for what has to be done. It’s not enough to say, like Joe Biden does, that Trump’s departure will change everything, or to claim, like Bernie Sanders does, that a “political revolution” will materialize to square every circle. A sustained questioning of the candidates on crucial issues of implementation, definitively nailing them down on items like filibuster reform where several have been slippery, could be worth a lot to voters who seem very hard-headed when it comes to electability but not necessarily in terms of exactly what electable candidates are expected to accomplish.

Yes, some parts of the Democratic primary electorate may feel that beating Trump and getting him and his cronies out of power is enough for one year; actually accomplishing anything is gravy. But that’s a sad and defensive posture to have, and one that voters are not likely to reward, either. Values are essential and vision can be inspiring in a president. But if that’s all a candidate offers, we need to know the next four years could become a huge disappointment and a lost opportunity.

After watching the seventh Democratic candidate debate this week, I observed a strangely bifurcated treatment of the event in the news media, and wrote up the phenomenon for New York:

If you didn’t watch last night’s Democratic presidential candidate debate from Des Moines and just checked into your favorite media outlets this morning to see what happened, you might have seen two distinctive takes that might as well have described two different events. One (offered by such veteran observers as Vox’s Matt Yglesias, TNR’s Walter Shapiro, and Politico’s Ryan Lizza) tended to treat the debate as unremarkable, with the candidates performing at various levels but not really generating any big moments, in part out of fear of offending Iowans’ famous sensitivity to negative politics. The other (including one I posted last night) focused heavily on the unsettling confrontations of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders after CNN moderator Abby Phillip, citing CNN reporting, injected an alleged statement by Sanders to Warren that a woman cannot beat Trump, into an otherwise mild-mannered debate. The dispute culminated in Warren refusing to shake Sanders’s hand after the event and Sanders seeming to storm away in frustration after a brief exchange of words.

The more comprehensive takes from Yglesias, Shapiro, and Lizza mentioned this incident, of course, but found it less than game-changing. You’d have to guess they were written before the post-debate confrontation between Warren and Sanders (they had unhappy-looking words and then Warren seems to have refused to shake Bernie’s proffered hand) that seemed to place an exclamation point on the whole evening. An example of how that moment changed things for many observers was evident at FiveThirtyEight, whose liveblog of the debate concluded with the same sort of not-much-to-see-here observations others were making. Their podcast, recorded a bit later in the wee hours, began with participants describing the debate with terms like “anti-climatic,” “snoozeville” and “nothingburger.” But midway through the recording, they became aware of the post-debate incident, and the conversation pivoted hard in the direction of the dispute and what its fallout would be. As he watched the video for the first time, Nate Silver mused that it “might affect how this thing is covered by the press.” Clare Malone wondered, “Does this entire incident look good for either the Warren or Sanders campaign?”

Some media outlets offered competing takes — one of a debate defined by comity, another of one defined by a moment of drama. The Des Moines Register, a debate co-sponsor, had one that focused on the Warren-Sanders dynamics and another that didn’t at all. Another co-sponsor, CNN, whose reporting and debate moderation caused the entire brouhaha, didn’t focus on it that much initially, either. And at Politico, conventional, broad-scope takes from Lizza and from John Harris (who called the debate “painfully dull”) competed with Tim Alberta’s report from a Des Moines bar frequented by young progressives, who were agonizing over the Warren-Sanders “feud.”

Determining which of these two very different versions of last night prevails in the public imagination will depend, of course, on how the situation plays out in the days ahead. FiveThirtyEight’s pre- and post-debate surveys with Ipsos showed Warren gaining the most in net favorability, and Sanders losing a bit, but it’s not clear why. And at this point, national perceptions of the debate may matter a lot less than those in Iowa, where viewership of this local event was probably very high.

The big risk for Sanders and Warren is that their confrontation, if it ends up dominating how Iowans think of the debate, will run afoul of Iowa Nice sensibilities and hurt both of them. But if the campaigns find a way to de-escalate, and the furor subsides, then the blander interpretations of the debate could turn out to be true after all. At best, though, it’s quite a distraction for the two progressive favorites at a moment when the Iowa race looks to be a close four-way tangle among Sanders, Warren, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg, with Amy Klobuchar desperately trying to join them.