The House Oversight Committee’s nine-hour-long hearing, featuring testimony by Michael Cohen, went much as you might expect for much of the day. Following Cohen’s blistering opening statement, Democrats spent their time moving point by point through Cohen’s statements and evidence. Meanwhile, Republicans devoted exactly zero percent of their time to asking about the actual crimes revealed by Cohen’s statements. Throughout the day, Republicans revealed themselves as not only a party that defends Trump’s actions, but one that has thoroughly adopted his tactics as its own, by spending almost all their time making personal attacks on the witness without concern for his statements.
But then, just before an afternoon break for a vote, the tone of the hearings changed, when questioning passed to Democrat Stacey Plaskett (U.S. Virgin Islands). In a sharp series of questions, Plaskett not only firmed up information about the payments that Trump provided to Cohen, but also pushed back directly against Republicans who had whined repeatedly that the hearing was “stealing time” from other topics. “Thank God,” said Plaskett, “the Democratic majority can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
When the hearing came back from the break, its whole tenor had shifted. There were two good reason for this: The imbalance in the number of Democrats and Republicans on the committee allowed a series of Democrats to question Cohen without five-minute interruptions for yet another recitation of the same Republican talking points; and the Democrats who talked in that afternoon session brought heat. It wasn’t that previous Democrats had not done well. It was that Plaskett and those who followed her performed with excellence.
Next came Ro Khanna, and Jimmy Gomez, and Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib. And every one of them drove another nail in not just Trump’s coffin, but the coffin of the whole Republican scheme.