I watched the House Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing from about 9:30am until they took their second recess in the early afternoon. It was a total waste of my time. It confirmed my opinion that Rep. Jerry Nadler has no idea how to be effective in this role, and his choice of witnesses was only part of the problem.

The purpose today wasn’t really to advance the ball on impeachment or to debate the facts of the case, but rather to give an academic lesson to the American people about the purposes of impeachment. As such, I had extremely low expectations that anything of particular interest to me would happen. But I did expect a good, focused lesson on some basic concepts, like the meaning of “high crimes,” misdemeanors,” “bribery,” and “obstruction of Congress.”

It wasn’t necessary for the experts to have any opinion about whether Trump had committed any of those offenses, and it certainly wasn’t a good idea to bring in people who have been highly critical of Trump to give their opinions on whether he should be impeached and removed from office.

The result was a partisan food fight that made the Republicans’ job of obfuscation far too easy.

The witnesses did provide definitions of the key terms, but that certainly wasn’t the emphasis and their impartiality was easy to question. It was basically a three-to-one battle of witnesses that educated few and persuaded no one.

The Republicans and their star witness Jonathan Turley were predictably disingenuous, and I don’t fault Nadler for that. But this hearing failed both as a primer on the Constitution and as an argument for Trump’s impeachment.

It was a wasted day. I don’t think much harm will come from it, but they should have brought forward the most damning evidence, including from Lev Parnas, before they asked people to express an opinion of whether the case has already been made.