What Went Down On Day 1 Of The Impeachment Hearings

Insisting that the whistleblower testify has been a common Republican talking point in the past few weeks. Here are four ways Republicans have been defending Trump, which you might see during the hearing today:

The idea of who is in charge is an interesting one too. So on the one hand, of course the president is in charge of the executive branch; that’s spelled out in the Constitution. But people who work for the executive branch are also accountable in some sense to Congress, and certainly to the people and the Constitution. Defenses that the president is “in charge” usually inspire some backlash about the extent and personal nature of presidential power.

To put it bluntly, a political advantage for Republicans of outing the whistleblower would be to attack their background in an attempt to delegitimize the report. The reality is, though, that the inspector general already deemed the report credible and it has been backed up by all the testimony we’ve seen so far.