Jon Chait has
a great piece up on the Republicans' hair-on-fire response to Schiff noting the CBS report on Trump threatening GOP senators heads if they vote contrary to his desires.
Quote:...It is certainly not as if the line Schiff quoted pushed the known contours of Trumpian behavior. This is an administration that delights in bullying Republicans and intimidating internal dissent. Trump has openly driven Republicans who criticize his behavior, like Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and Justin Amash, out of the party, boasting that he has ended their careers.
What’s more, the broader notion that Republicans Senators are simply afraid to admit Trump acted inappropriately in the Ukraine scandal is widely understood within the party. Even the stalwart Trump defender Brit Hume conceded this month that most Republicans already believe Trump is lying about Ukraine, even if they won’t say so. Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg notes that a huge number of Republicans privately believe Trump pressured Ukraine to smear his rivals, but that the offense simply does not rise to the level of justifying removal. “[M]any of the lawyers and pundits who carry water for the president in public will concede in private that what Trump did was wrong — either legally, constitutionally, politically, or all three,” he reports, “I can’t tell you how many Republican senators and Congressmen I’ve talked to — away from a microphone or television camera — who will concede this basic point, even if they have a wide array of views on the wisdom of impeaching the president or the way the impeachment process worked.”
Schiff’s broader point — that many if not most Republican officeholders know Trump did something wrong, but are afraid to say so out of fear of retribution — is broadly understood within the party...
As I pointed out several days ago, it was
entirely predictable that this sort of presentation of enraged indignation would be the main aspect of their response, as it was with Kavanaugh and as it was in the House investigation.