Hey, everyone. We recorded most of this show between 8 o'clock and 9 o'clock last night.

By the time I left, around 1 in the morning, Adam Schiff was still holding it down on the floor of the Senate.

Anyway, we tried to keep it pretty up to date. Here's the show.

Hello? Jim! Hello.

Jim.

What's up?

How you doing?

Ugh.

This is Jim Newell.

Peak, Jim Newell, actually.

I'm ready to get out of here. I'm ready to go to Iowa.

You and the rest of the country.

Everyone wants to go to Iowa, exactly.

Jim is our senior politics writer here at Slate.

And I called him up a few hours after the Senate impeachment trial kicked off in earnest yesterday.

Because I wanted to get a sense of what it was like in there. Jim told me the usual. There's a bunch of traffic, cameras everywhere. But there was something new in the

little office that he works out of. There's a brand new metal detector here, which I believe is in the

Senate press gallery for the first time in history,

just making everything a little more difficult.

A metal detector.

What do they think you're bringing into the Senate gallery?

If it was something dangerous, you know, they presumably would have picked that up when we entered the Capitol building in the first place when we went through that metal detector.

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