Let's start with the hearings themselves, and why they played out the way they did. Democrats felt they had an obligation to put Robert Mueller on camera, and maybe they did, but whatever they hoped to gain... uh... No. There are several reasons for that. First, and most substantively, Mueller was not going to say anything of substance. He walked into that room reluctantly, telling House Democrats that he wasn't going to deviate from his report, nor read any parts of it, because he didn't want to give them any sound-bites. So, the likelihood that he was going to give them anything real was low in the extreme. Add to that, Mueller himself.
I'm just going to say this. He came across as a doddering, senile old man who didn't know what was in his own report. Granted, it was certainly written as a team document because the investigation was a team investigation. Still, watch that testimony divorced from any political expectations, and you will see someone who didn't seem all there, and didn't seem to know what was in his own document. Whether he wrote it all himself or not isn't the issue. He was lead. He needed to know it backwards and forwards. He didn't.
I've been telling you for I-don't-even-know-how-long that Trump would never face any legal consequences, and that Mueller was no legal threat to him at all. Optics are all that could even potentially matter, and the optics of that were atrocious for the Democrats. They also can't be all that surprising. Mueller's brief press appearance prior to his testimony wasn't dramatically different.
Does this mean Mueller isn't smart, or that he actually is senile, or something? Nope. Public speaking is hard, and those are some weird situations. That said, Mueller is a prosecutor, right? He should have some chops there. What's going on? I don't know, but put politics aside, and he didn't seem all there.
Democrats need to deal with the fact that Mueller's performance was horrendous, and performance was all that happened.
So let's deal with that. All of politics are now empty theater. All the world's a stage, and all the politicians merely players.
Some of the Democrats understood the play. Nadler understood that he could ask Mueller certain types of yes/no questions in order to build some semi-dynamic theater with an unwilling and untalented co-star. The Democrats who thought they had a more cooperative partner willing to improvise failed abysmally because that partner-- Mueller-- died on stage with such aplomb.
I will also note that Peter Welch engaged Mueller on a matter that has appeared many times on The Unmututal Political Blog. I have regularly pushed back on the false claim that Mueller's report could be interpreted as a rejection of the claim that anyone in Trump's campaign conspired with the Russians. A common misinterpretation of Mueller's report was that Mueller "found no evidence" of conspiracy, or some similar phrasing. This is false. Rather, Mueller did indeed find evidence. Quite a lot of it, but the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction under conspiracy laws, so Mueller did not recommend prosecution. That is very different from finding that "there was no conspiracy," or whatever other phrasing has been pushed on gullible media by Trump, Republicans and others insistent on ignoring publicly available evidence of their guilt simply because conspiracy laws have extraordinarily high evidentiary thresholds for conviction and there is pressure to find in favor of Trump to avoid the appearance of media bias. Translation: yes, there is plenty of evidence of a conspiracy, and "collusion," but getting a conviction would be too hard given how the laws are written. That's far from a statement of Trump's or anyone else's innocence. Instead, it's an indictment of the laws themselves.
Peter Welch was on this.
Mostly, though, Mueller's failure involved the Democrats' failure. Compare his performance when interacting with Nadler to his performance interacting with other Democrats. They failed to get anything good out of him because they tried to get him to go beyond what he was willing to do. Nadler recognized the boundaries Mueller had set, worked within that, and the result was better theater.
Not that theater is anything more than theater, but good theater is better than bad theater.
We do, however, have to address the Republican side of the theater. I'll single out Will Hurd here for being the one Republican actually interested in the well-being of the country, because he honestly cares about, ya' know, the fact that Russia tries to mess with our elections, which is an attack on our democracy. I've pointed out before, though, that Will Hurd is an anomaly in the GOP for his willingness to challenge Russia, and Trump's subservience to them, so... That's just Will Hurd. A relatively lonely voice in the party, without quite the same courage as Justin Amash, and hence still actually a Republican.
One more quick acknowledgement to Elise Stefanik. You may have missed this, but there was a fun moment with Mueller. Most Republicans didn't want to talk about Russian election interference, how many of Trump's people lied and obstructed Mueller's investigation, or anything like that. They were totally obsessed, though, with the fact that the "Steele dossier" was funded by a group that was contracted by the Clinton campaign. Mueller made it clear that he wasn't going to talk about the Steele dossier, because it had nothing to do with Russia's election interference, or Trump's obstruction of justice, which were the things he investigated. But, it was all the Republicans wanted to ask, so they all asked the same questions, leading to Mueller reciting the same refusal. Stefanik made a calm acknowledgment that she knew he wouldn't answer, and was just asking because she was supposed to do so to have those questions put on the record, or something.
She knew it was all empty theater. If you admit you're full of it, you at least get some respect from me for the admission that what you're doing is a farce.
The rest of the GOP?
OK, so you know how I've been writing recently about the return of "symmetry" to the party system?
Umm....
Lemme backtrack here. Not spending my days and nights watching Fox, I can lose track of just how batshit the Republican Party is right now. I've been taking jabs at people like Pramila Jayapal lately, but while I think she's nuts to press for impeachment, her questioning the other day wasn't wacko. The Republican questioning has gone full Nunes.
While the Democratic Party is moving to the ideological extreme at a pace that I find startling, adopting indefensible policy positions, rallying around an anti-semite, and doing plenty of other lunatic things, Republican conspiracy theorizing is just... at the risk of repeating myself...
OK, so lemme see if I can get this straight. Trump's people are regularly meeting with the Russians in attempts to get dirt on Clinton, including the Russia-to-WikiLeaks-to-Roger Stone/Jerome Corsi-to-Trump connection (to say nothing of Manafort-Kilimnik because the GOP currently thinks Kilimnik is an American agent?!), while Trump is trying to set up a business deal in Russia while lying about it to everyone, but the real Russia-collusion thing is that Hillary was colluding with Russia to produce the Steele dossier, deviously holding onto it, in secret until after the election, because that's what you do when you're colluding with a foreign country to take down your opponent with the dossier produced via your collusion!
My... brain... can't... deal...
How much moonshine do you have to drink before this makes sense? How much pro-wrestling do you have to watch?
This is a problem for scholars. To be sure, there are some stupid people with PhDs. There are some stupid professors out there, but those of us who do serious scholarship, as I do in my real job (honestly, record of solo-authored publications here!), have a difficult time keeping a grip on how gripped by stupidity certain people are. Yes, Donald Trump reminds us daily that he is a few violins short of an orchestra, and scholarly models like Levitsky & Ziblatt's model of democratic backsliding from How Democracies Die provide us with the concept of ideological collusion, by which strategic actors decide to back someone like Trump because they get policy out of it (e.g., tax cuts and Supreme Court appointments). What we can easily forget, though, is that many of these actors aren't exactly strategic. Louis Gohmert can't strategically plan to limit his moonshine consumption during pro-wrestling to avoid having to run out to his out-house to puke and miss the part where the face and the heel finally "fight." The roadkill he has for dinner probably doesn't help to settle his stomach. (Texans...) Some of these people are just, like Donnie himself, a saxophone short of a quintet. Stupidity is rampant, on a scale that those of us with functioning brains cannot comprehend, and further, the thought processes of these musically-deficient pseudo-minds are not processes that we can comprehend because they are so far outside of the experiences of those of us who, you know... think for a living. Or, at all.
There is a large chunk of the population-- including dimwits in Congress-- rallying around conspiracy theories that are even more back-asswards than Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Let's be clear about this. LBJ didn't have anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, by any reasonable evidence. However, he at least could be said to have a motive. You could put yourself in his head, and say, hey, I wanna be president! I think I'll be better at it than this kid! There. Motive. In a sense, it could make sense.
The conspiracy theory about how Clinton was the real Russia-colluder? It makes the opposite of sense. It is, quite seriously, crazier than most of the Kennedy assassination theories. Go through your favorite moon landing conspiracy theories. They'll point to something in the photos. There would even be a motive! Posing for technological muscle-flexing! See? Motive!
The conspiracy theory of Clinton working with the Russians to produce a document of lies to take down Trump and... hide it throughout the campaign?! Huh?! And yet, this conspiracy theory was the central, motivating principle behind most of the GOP questioning.
I have been writing lately about the return of symmetry to party politics, but there is an asymmetry here-- asymmetry of conspiratorial thinking.
Conspiracy theories do, and have a history of crossing party lines. I have posted about this before, but right now, the big asymmetry is that the GOP is motivated by insane conspiracy theories to a degree that the Democrats are not, and that was fully on display. Why? They needed conspiracy theories to counter the facts of the Trump campaign's attempts to conspire with Russia, Trump's attempts to obstruct justice, ongoing attempts by Russia to interfere with our electoral system, which every Republican except Will Hurd invites... They serve a necessary function in a party that has rallied around the most corrupt politician in American history.
OK, that was the hearing. What now?
What now is... nothing. That was it. We're done.
There are two ways to look at this. Those hoping for impeachment have to look at the hearings as disastrous. Why? Mueller sucked. This was all about optics, and the optics sucked for the pro-impeachment side. In a way, that makes Trump look good, so, bad for Democrats, right?
Not so fast. Impeachment, as I have been writing, would be disastrous for Democrats. The probability of conviction in the Senate is absolute, mathematical zero. I write that as a statistician, who abhors such language. Without some weird thing, like a series of freak accidents in which Republican senators and governors die, such that the Republican governors are replaced by Democrats, who appoint Democrats to replace the dead Republican senators... No. The golden shower tape could come out, along with an admission from Trump that he's being blackmailed by Putin, and that wouldn't move a single Republican Senator.
Just watch Lindsey Graham, and I dare you to disagree with me.
Trump wants to be impeached because the inevitable acquittal in the Senate would be another "win," another way to say that the Democrats are wasting the country's time, and show everyone that it means he's innocent. A formal acquittal. Hand him that, and it's a campaign weapon.
Mueller's horrendous performance, while fun for Trump, takes the air out of the impeachment drive, which is longer-term healthy for the Democrats.
Of course, this is probably irrelevant anyway. Most incumbents are re-elected, unless there is some economic problem, and while the yield curve is inverted, which is predictive of a recession, recessions generally have causes, and there aren't any clear causes of a recession in the next year, in which case Trump is going to win.
I'm going to say that again, because it's important. While the polls got 2016 wrong, the forecasting models got it right. Those same models give Trump an advantage in 2020. After 2016, I did my penance, and said that I wasn't going to disregard those political science models again. This is me, keeping my word. An incumbent with a growing economy wins, and recessions don't just happen 'cuz. Housing market bubbles bursting, the Fed inducing a recession to bring down high inflation... recessions have causes. Yes, the yield curve is inverted, but we don't have a cause, and no, the Fed isn't doing what they did to bring down inflation to cause the 81-2 recession. Not even close. They're probably about to lower rates, after some very gradual increases. Recession? Maybe, but it's guesswork at this point. Trump probably wins. Better than 50% for him, anyway.
And even if he lost, you need to start asking about what happens when he refuses to accept it and step down, because there is zero chance of Trump both losing and accepting it to step down under a normal transition of power. Zero.
Impeachment was never on the table. Those hearings were empty theater, and they were always bound to be that. I've been telling you all along, Trump would get away with everything. He has, and he will.