Of the Vanderbilt University jon meacham. And Kurt Bardella is with us this morning. And nbc news and msnbc law analyst and editor and chief of law fair, benjamin wittes. Donald trump likes to frame his presidency in historic terms, and thats exactly how its playing out in washington right now. For only the fourth time in history, congress is considering removing the commander and chief from office. Its a process thats likely to have the 45th president impeached by next week. The House Judiciary Committee will reconvene in just a few hours to continue debating the two articles of impeachment. The committee is expected to vote later today to sent measure to the full house. Each measure delivered in an Opening Statement yesterday, the session lasting for hours. Here is some of what we heard. I hope every member of this committee will withstand the political pressures of the moment. I hope that none of us attempt to justify behavior that we know in our heart is wrong. I want to speak directly to my republican friends. Wake up. Stop thinking about running for reelection. Stop worrying about being primary. Stop deflecting and distracting and treating those you represent as if they dont see whats going on. Like theyre not smart enough to realize that you are willfully ignoring the facts to protect a corrupt and dangerous president. If we decide the president is above the law, then we will no longer live in a democracy. We will live in a dictatorship trading the values of madison for the values of moscow. I know theyre desperate. You know how i know it . Adam schiffs own words yesterday. We cant go to court, that would take too long. An election is coming. No, adam, what you need to continue to say is, we cant beat him next year. The only thing we need say 30second commercial saying we impeached him. Unlike the nixon and clinton impeachment, there is no crime thats alleged to have been committed by the president of the United States. There are policy differences, theres no allegation of bribery in these articles. Theres no allegation of extortion. We are marking up articles of impeachment for offenses that arent crimes that some members of congress have never heard of before, much less no what it means. Its not just because they dont like the president , they dont like us. They dont like the 63 Million People who voted for this president. All of us in flyover country, all of us common folk in ohio, wisconsin, tennessee, texas, they dont like us. They dont like the president s supporters and they dislike us so much theyre willing to weaponize the government. Few years ago was the irs, then it was the fbi. And now its the impeachment in Congress Going over 63 Million People and the guy we put in the white house. Thats wonderfully funny. Its good entertainment in the morning coming from jim jordan. They dont like us . Im sorry, jim, i am youre talking about a guy that went to state schools in the deep south and, unlike you, im still conservative. I still believe in small government and balanced budgets and free trade and pushing back on russia. So us . Dont try that. This is about a president of the United States who actually likes russia, likes Vladimir Putin, likes doing whatever he can do to help Vladimir Putin, whether its saying that ukraines not a real country or trying to undercut the democratically elected free leader of ukraine while Vladimir Putin has invaded that country. You know, you can roll up your Shirt Sleeves and take off your jacket as long as you want to. You can do this us versus them flyover space crap, i invented that, all right. Me and a lot of other guys invented that while you were going around at ohio state and working with that guy quinn or quil or whatever his name was that was doing bad things to wrest lette wrestlers that he shouldnt have done while other people were turning their heads. Lets not try that flyover space garbage, all right. Its fascinating, though, that all of the yelling and screaming, they never get to the fact, do they, kurt, they never get to the fact first of all that they didnt even like in a more extreme way against barack obama. You were there, you were on the committee, you know what the Oversight Committee did to barack obama. Everything now that theyre acting shocked and saying that the governments been weaponized, thats number one. But number two, they never really address the underlying issue, and that is that donald trump as commander and chief used his position to extort support from a foreign country to interfere in an election and held up about 400 million of military defense weapons that Congress Already approved that was supposed to stop whom . Vladimir putin from invading the rest of the country. But you say this morning in a think piece, i know willie will love this, that the House Republicans have adopted the brick tamlin loud noises defense. Loud noises, because thats all they have. Theyre making loud noises. Weve seen time and again with all these proceedings republicans fall back on the same strategy which is to yell as frequently as possibly and loudly as possible in the hopes that nobody will notice that they have not described this call with zelensky as a perfect call. That theyve not once talked about defending the substance of what the president is accused of. They must not have read the impeachment articles here because its straightforward what hes accused of. Republicans like jim jordan wrote the book on how to weaponize oversight for what they did to the barack obama administration. The idea that they can turn around now and say this is shocking that people would issue subpoenas, that they want to have testimony. Give us a quick example of that hypocrisy about how people like jim jordan, what they did on fast and furious, what they did on benghazi, what they did on these other investigations. Well, something that was interesting that jordan said, he talked about the irs during the hearing yesterday. And they held a four to fiveyear investigation alleging that the irs was targeting conservatives. At the end of that investigation, by the way, it turned out, no, that wasnt happening. Thats 100 false. Yet, they held these hearings. They held an Administration Official in contempt of congress for not cooperating with their madeup political driven hearing. And here is he again saying, well, were going to ignore history and im going to use something that i know isnt true to try to justify what im doing now, which is defending the president at all costs. And, again, its like i wrote today, that scene in anchor man when theyre in the news Directors Office yelling about the hiring of a woman, theyre saying loud noises, i dont know what were yelling about. Thats jim jordan. Thats doug collins. Thats louie gobert and thats all that theyve got. In his whole routine of talking fast, he theyre just afraid they cant beat donald trump, and were going to talk fast and also i dislike georgia. Sold. Keep going. Sold but, again, this is this the netherworld. I guess maybe theyll play a clip of that on a trumpsupporting network. But we just showed polls a couple of days ago. Joe bidens up by nine points over donald trump in a lot of the most recent polls. Hes beating him in wisconsin, hes beating him in michigan. Hes beat beiing him in pennsylvania. If you look at the polls right now, unless a democrat had his or her head buried in the and is for the past several months, i mean, nobodys thinking joe biden cant beat donald trump. In fact, its looking just the opposite, like biden has almost a doubledigit lead over trump in some of the most important states. Yeah. It was a fascinating day yesterday. It shouldnt be a surprise that republicans were deflecting from the evidence that we saw in this ukraine hearing. All the witness whos stepped forward, nonpartisan witnesses, and told a story about what the president did. What was new in this example, anyway, was the culture war aspect of it which was going back to echoes of the 2016 campaign and how donald trump got elected in the is these people, they hate you, they hate us, theyll do anything to overturn election. Not addressing the evidence or the questions before them, but taking a bigger view, jon meacham, sitting in nashville, tennessee, this morning, that this is about a group of people in the democrats and coastal elites who dont like us and will stop at nothing to, as they say, overturn the election of the man 63 Million People voted for. Its a culture argument more than anything. It is. And it goes back to the 1790s. The what Richard Hofstetter called the paranoid style in american politics, which is the use of a conspiracy. The idea that this is an ultimate struggle and there are people, there are forces that are unseen yet powerful who are trying to control your lives. And i hate to say this, but every element of american politics or just about every element, left, right, whatever that meant in a given era, have at some time or another used this. Because its a natural human argument to make. Where we are right now and where we were last night is one of the richest ironies, though, in that long span. Because theres really in the modern era the conservative sense that there is a media legal deep state world against them. Really begins with alger hiss, Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt. They all walked into a bar just kidding and theres one parachute. But it began in 1945 when hiss was a young state Department Aide, conservatives came to believe that Franklin Roosevelt had sold us out, it was called the stab in the back sellout of eastern europe, and this enraged a huge part of the country. Richard nixon, a young congressman from california, takes on alger hiss successfully on the house on American Activities Committee, and so it began that there was this harvard elite that was trying to undermine the real america and it would require these noble figures from the heartland, california wasnt what california is now to defeat it. And the reason i call that rich irony is think for a second, that was all about defending us against russia. Against the soviet union. So in this bizarre moment were in, this fun house world thats not fun because its real, the National Security interests that shaped us for three or four generations have been turned upside down while this cultural strategy unfolds. But it is a sequential chapter and a drama and i think the way weve overcome it in the past, the way we defeated joe mccarthy and grew out of that was enough people decided, you know what . This is not who we want to be all the time. Joe, i just covered alger hiss on my bingo card for the morning. Heres something i found more fascinating. I dont know what type of bars jon meacham goes to in rocky top, and i know they call it you know where im going . He goes these three people walked into a bar and theres only one parachute. I mean mixing a couple jokes there. Its okay. Mixing a couple jokes, but that bar is on one high cliff. Batman begins or something. This is good stuff. This works really well out in the tapioca. Beyond the bingo card, everything jims talking about, everything jim jordan was talking about yesterday, its so far afield from the evidence. And, again, the questions before congress about whether or not President Trump abused his power and committed an impeachment offense, they are not in any way and they havent from the beginning, we know that, addressing the evidence. Theyre not addressing the question. Do you believe its okay for the president to use his office to extort, to bribe a foreign country to get dirt for a president ial election . That is the question before them that they dont want to answer. Yeah, they dont want to answer the question. Again, the flyover space argument is so hilarious. I mean, when i so, when i represented flyover space, we supported, i fought for, the reason i ran for office was for balanced budgets. And donald trump and jim jordan are responsible for the Biggest National debt ever. The biggest deficits in an expansionary time ever. And like jon said, russia, we fought to push back against russia. We held hearings about it all the time with Armed Services chit tee committee. This is an administration thats embracing russia and pushing propaganda that the intel agencies actually warned them against doing another thing. We always criticized democrats for undermining the intel community. We were still talking in the 1990s about the Church Commission in the early 1970s because we thought the democrats were insufficiently supportive of our intel agencies. Now its jim jordan and other republicans that are slashing and burning and attacking our intel agencies all the time. Free markets, i support free markets. Ive supported free markets. I fight against tariffs. Always have been against tariffs. Thats what people in flyover space, at least the flyover space i lived in for 45 years in florida, mississippi, alabama, and georgia, thats what we fought against. And, yet, youve got a Trumpian Party that is passing tariff taxes on to working class americans, hurting farmers all across america. This is this is not even my fathers Republican Party, this isnt my Republican Party. And, jonathan lemire, theyre talking about flyover space and trying play that us against them garbage. It doesnt cut that way anymore because you have conservatives now split, true conservatives, split away from this bizarre pro russia, pro big debt, pro big spending Republican Party. Even rand paul said donald trump and jim jordans last budget, so big it was, perhaps, the biggest pork barrelled spending project in the history of the republic. There certainly could be some fractures on the conservative values like those. But this is the tax cut that donald trump has campaigned and most republican allies have used since 2016, the us versus them. Turning everything into a fight. The idea we heard him at his rally in pat other nigpennsylva about how others would start whimpering and crying. And we can set aside this president likes to play the victim more than anybody. They hit back at me i hit back harder. Thats what theyre doing here. Unlike the clinton and nixon impeachment moments, both of them took it seriously. They participated in the process and they neededly so. They needed to have a serious response to serious matters. But by doing so it elevated the process. People around this process told me part of what theyre trying to do is fight, fight, fight and dismiss, to not give oxygen to the other side, to downplay the whole concept. Faint as, this their phrase, a political witchhunt that doesnt have anything to do with the president. We know thats incorrect. We know its a matter of law. Its a matter of the constitution and thats why the democrats and the house have forged forward. But thats how theyre portraying it and theyre heartened by recent polling that suggests the president s approval hasnt slipped much. Now, hes still behind a nufbt democrats he could face in 2020. But they think, again, that hes going to get impeached and th thats going to personally infuriate the president and theyll try to spin it into a win. And hell go out and tour next year and suggest that he survived this and that will be the launch of his reelection campaign. It seems to me, mika, there will be fraying around the edges. Theres some polls you look, again, collins talked about how theres no way to beat donald trump. I looked over the headtohead matchups. Bidens ahead by nine in one poll. Up by 13 in one taken a couple weeks ago. You look head to head in states, hes ahead of donald trump by nine points in pennsylvania. Hes ahead of donald trump in other important swing states. It helps actually explain not why the democrats are afraid of this is you got to give the auctioneer some credit here. It just hes so extraordinary. Youve got to give him some credit for trying to confuse everybody in tv land. But you look at these matchups, biden crushing donald trump by nine points. The socialist, as donald trump calls him, beating donald trump by eight points. Pocahontas, as donald trump calls him, the one that he says what did he say . She has a fresh mouth . Well guess what . Fresh mouth is kicking your butt by seven points. There you go. Even bloomberg, i know youre upset that bloomberg has about 50 times amount of money you do, even bloombergs beating you. Mayor petes beating you. Amys beating you. Yeah, mika, this whole auctioneer argument that somehow democrats are afraid they cant beat they know they can beat donald trump. It actually is in the opposite direction. Donald trump is afraid that joe biden can beat him. Thats why he decided to hold up almost 400 million of military funding that would protect our democratic ally against further invasion by Vladimir Putin. Thats thats sort of he got that backwards, actually. Yeah. And democrats seem to be in a good position as things stand right now. Benjamin wittes, well get to the ig hearing in a moment, but i wanted to ask you since the House Judiciary Committee is on track to impeach the president by next week as things are going, weve also heard from mitch mccop nnnell indicated he wants a short impeachment trial with no new witnesses called. It seems politically and legally the strategy on both sides is focused on speed. What do you make of that . Well, the first thing i make of it is well see whether it holds. You know, the strategy of the house impeachment managers will be they want to present their case. They will want to present this incredible story that theyve developed in the course of hes house hearings and they will want to augment that story with the testimony of certain people who they sought to get testimony from in the house and failed because the white house stiffed them. And that, of course, is part of the basis