So here we are, impeaching Donald Trump one more time.

Do you have a sense of deja vu right now?

None.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has always been my impeachment buddy.

So yesterday, I called her up and asked her to give me an impeachment

preview again. I have no sense of deja vu, both because a year ago is like 10 kaffillion glacial

ages. Like, I'm trying to remember how I felt the night before the impeachment trial in the Senate a year ago, and I can't even recall.

Also, it was a totally different enterprise, right?

I think at the time, Democrats were trying to explain this unbelievably complicated arcane conspiracy theory with 100 players and all these witnesses. And now it's the

opposite, right? Like it's like roll tape. Everybody saw it. It's not complicated at all.

Last month, Dahlia interviewed the lawyer who helped lead the House impeachment proceedings the first time around.

She wanted to know how he saw this sequel.

He just sounded as though the inexorable lesson he learned from 1.0 is that it's just not a legal proceeding and that he had taken, you know, years of

history, having prosecuted the mob, having, you know, prevailed in big mob trials and big white

collar conspiracy trials, that he went into this proceeding thinking it was a legal proceeding

and walked away, realizing it was politics all the way down.

And the thing he said, Mary, that really has stuck with me is, if this were a legal proceeding, half of the people who are jurors would have to be excluded, right?

They were either eyewitnesses or victims. Some of them were implicated.

If this were a trial, on opening day, you go to the judge and you say, you know, strike this

juror, strike this juror, this person can't be here, this person has a conflict of interest.

None of that's going to happen. What Dahlia is getting at here is that the impeachment proceedings we're about to watch,

they can't possibly meet our usual standards of fairness.

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