Good Wednesday morning. I'm Anna Palmer. Welcome to your Politico Playbook audio briefing. Stay tuned for a message from Stop, the Hit Coalition after the show. And I'm Jake Sherman. The House's impeachment of Donald Trump is kind of like watching Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime video. The twist and turns are exciting. You know the guy's going to get chased with a gun, stabbed, and do it all in exotic locales. Every episode makes you sweat as

Jackets into one pickle or another. In the end, though, you kind of know the showrunners

probably won't kill him off. Impeachment is kind of similar. The hearings these next two weeks

are momentous and historic. They will highlight just how unusual this White House is. The president's

personal lawyer was running around the globe trying to get a foreign

country to investigate a political rival. And the U.S. government was dangling meetings and money

as enticements. We'll hear from longtime foreign servants, a military official, and White House

insiders, all of whom have the same view of this administration's behavior, improper, immoral, and wrongheaded. At the end of the day, we have a pretty good idea how this movie is going to end, a nearly party-line vote with most every Democrat voting to impeach the president, and nearly all Republicans voting against that. But in the middle, the next nine days, you'll get nonstop white-knuckle action. Here's the timeline of the witnesses. Today, Bill Taylor

and George Kent. Friday, Marie Yvanovitch. Tuesday, Jennifer Williams, Alexander Minman,

Kurt Volker, and Timothy Morrison, Wednesday, Gordon, Sondland, Laura Cooper, and David Hale,

and Thursday, Fiona Hill. Let's take it a step further. Is it impossible to envision 20

Republicans in the Senate voting to remove Trump? No step further. Is it impossible to envision 20 Republicans in the Senate

voting to remove Trump? No, but it seems close to impossible to envision it when GOP lawmakers

like Senator John Cornyn are telling Politico that he won't even watch the proceedings because

they are a political side show. And Senator David Perdue of Georgia says nothing rises to the

level of impeachment.

Today begins what many are describing as the beginning of what could stretch to a three-month

impeachment process. That's a long time. Will the public be swayed by Democrats' arguments,

or will it tire of the process? A few things worth keeping an eye on House Republicans,

especially some of the lawmakers in this committee, have a tendency to dive down rabbit holes, read the transcript and see how often they end up talking about the steel dossier or other ancillary issues. Will they continue that or will they stay narrowly focused on the issue at hand? Will Devin Nunes follow Adam Schiff's lead and allow his staff counsel to take the lead in questioning, will they flail around

or will they stay tightly focused on what Republicans consider their most effective line to date?

How is this a quid pro quo if Ukraine got the money without issuing a statement about the Biden's?

...