Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Tuesday, February 9th 2021.

I'm John Pothor. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor

A. Greenwald. Hi, Aide. Hi, John. Senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John.

And associate editor Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi, John. So we have an impeachment trial

starting today. The actual arguments will begin tomorrow. Apparently today we will hear

we're doing this in the pretty early morning. We will have a couple of hours to debate

this question of whether or not it's constitutional to try Donald Trump since he is no longer

president though he was impeached while he was president and then beginning tomorrow at

noon there will be each side will get eight hours to make its case. Then there will be

some kind of a vote on whether to allow witnesses and presuming that that vote says no there

won't be witnesses. There will be a vote to acquit him relatively soon thereafter and

that will be the end of everything. So my supposition here is that the House managers

who want to take this seriously and treat this as though this is a trial without a foregone

conclusion have their work cut out for them. They are going to have to do something sort

of sensational or bring up matters we're not aware of at the moment that are so startling

that they cause the democratic senators to say you know what we better we better keep

this going either because the public gas and the initial polling says oh my god this is

terrible like we need to hear more of this or because they have surfaced some evidence

that we don't know about that says that that has a smoking gun to it. Otherwise this

is a pretty disgraceful spectacle it seems to me particularly given that I'm somebody

who has argued that the impeachment and removal or the or the impeachment and the sanction

of no longer being able to run for office is necessary because the Democrats decided to

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