This goes against everything I was just reading about the Dalai Lama’s teachings about seeing my neighbor as another human being just like me, but I’m personally hoping for a bloodbath of embarrassing moments at the impeachment trial. Not that I’m an aspiring Buddhist anyway.

The reason goes back to how dangerously close we came to having a fascist regime with a small army of cult followers running the country. Republicans can’t be trusted with supporting free and fair elections so the only short term solution is to make sure there are less of them. They are already cooking up ways to make voting more difficult in 2022 where they are in control in Arizona, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Taking a page from the Benghazi playbook Democrats should drag culpable republicans through a public spectacle of a senate trial with the goal of pasting as much egg on their faces as possible. That’s exactly what they did to Hillary Clinton with the Benghazi hearings and it was very effective at putting a stain on the Clinton brand.

I have no fantasies that Trump will be convicted and I suspect the impeachment managers know the outcome of the final vote is inevitable. That would depend heavily on 17 senators doing the right thing (they won’t). But that’s not the point this time. This is more like getting sued and opening up the process for discovery. Yes, let’s please do review what just happened publicly.

Tens of thousands of people have left the Republican party since the failed insurrection attempt on Jan. 6th. If Democrats play their cards right they can make the Republican brand so toxic by the end of the senate trial that nobody should want that moniker next to their name. It’ll take years to rub the stink off.

With apologies to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this is how the game is played now, or we risk not having a democracy for much longer. Republicans might go through some things this week, and I’m less interested in seeing the final weigh in of the main ticket and more interested to see how many Congressional Republicans get dragged along for the ride.