THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 13
COMMENT
DISORDERIN THEHOUSE
B
y traditional civil-disobedience
standards, the apparel of the pro-
testers in the Capitol basement last
Wednesday fell on the bespoke side.
During the civil-rights movement,
members of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee favored over-
alls, in solidarity with the humble cit-
izens whose rights were being denied.
In 2017, women protesting the Inaugu-
ration of the nation’s most prominent
misogynist were identifiable by the pink
“pussy hats” they wore. By contrast, the
thirty-some House Republicans—all
of them white and all but a few male—
who stormed a secure hearing room
appeared less “We Shall Overcome”
than “We Are Overcompensated.”
The plan was to disrupt the depo-
sition of Laura Cooper, a Deputy As-
sistant Secretary of Defense and an ex-
pert on Russia and Ukraine, who was
to address a bipartisan group compris-
ing members of the committees han-
dling the inquiry into the impeachment
of Donald Trump. The protesters de-
cried what they considered the Soviet-
style secrecy of the process. Some car-
ried their cell phones into the room—a
breach of security—tweeted about their
antics, and ordered pizza. In effect, they
were trying to stop a hearing that was
in compliance with rules set in 2015 by
the House—which at the time had a
Republican majority—and which a
number of them, as members of the
committees involved, were already free
to attend. In essence, the stunt was a
high-profile display of fealty to Trump,
who measures loyalty by a willingness
to commit acts of self-abasement on
his behalf.
After the recent explosive develop-
ments in the impeachment inquiry, such
a display was almost to be predicted.
(In the Senate, Lindsey Graham si-
multaneously prepared a resolution,
co-sponsored by the Majority Leader,
Mitch McConnell, to condemn the in-
quiry as “illegitimate”; forty-six Repub-
licans signed it.) Here, too, Republi-
cans were following the President’s lead.
On the eve of the 2016 election, Trump
railed against a “rigged” political system
that was conspiring to produce a victory
for Hillary Clinton. Observers pointed
to the recklessness of his words and to
the ways in which delegitimatizing the
system might eventually culminate in
unrest. He has gone considerably farther
down that road. Last week, he called Re-
publicans who do not support him
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
“human scum,” and referred to the im-
peaching process as a “lynching.” Ac-
cording to the N.A.A.C.P., between 1882
and 1968 nearly five thousand people
were lynched in the United States,
three-quarters of them African-Ameri-
cans. None of them had a former U.S.
Attorney and mayor of New York City
acting as their personal lawyer, or an en-
tire political party defending them.
The current situation has arisen not
as a result of Democratic overreach but
because the facts increasingly indicate
that the President has committed im-
peachable violations. The G.O.P. pro-
test came after closed-door testimony
from William Taylor, the top U.S. dip-
lomat in Ukraine, who, in a fifteen-page
opening statement, described an ex-
plicit quid pro quo, in which Trump
withheld military aid in the hope of
pressuring President Volodymyr Ze-
lensky to launch investigations into a
debunked conspiracy theory about the
2016 election and into Joe Biden and
his son, Hunter. Taylor’s statement is
stunning in its allegations of self-interest
guiding foreign policy toward a coun-
try fighting Russian aggression. For-
eign policy is always a matter of bal-
ancing competing national interests,
but the interests weighed here are not
national, or at least not American—
they are Russian and Trumpian.
The circumstances are so bizarre as
to make the former national-security
adviser John Bolton seem like a voice
of restraint. Taylor reports that Bolton
abruptly ended a meeting with Ukrainian
officials at which Gordon Sondland,
the U.S. Ambassador to the European
