Our latest Inside briefing — a conversation with voting expert Rick Hasen — is available to watch. Josh and Rick had a wide-ranging conversation on the various threats to voting in the U.S., including “dirty tricks” by bad actors to skew elections and efforts to suppress the vote by the Trump administration and its allies. Is it fair to say that voter suppression efforts have results in Republicans “stealing elections”? The two discuss.

Much has been written about Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Michael Bennet’s (D-CO) dueling responsibilities in Iowa and Washington, D.C. as the four juggle campaigning while they’re muzzled for hours and hours listening to the Senate’s impeachment trial. But on the evening that’ll produce the first referendum on 2020 Democratic candidates, their shackling in the Senate feels increasingly futile. Especially after what happened last week.

For years I’ve been talking about the phrase, the title of an article by Slate’s Will Saletan: The GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord. Like a good poem I’ve come back to it again and again and found new levels to its meaning. The key point Will was getting at was that the fractures in the GOP, its ungovernability, institutional breakdown and extremism had made it possible for an outsider to wrest control of the whole thing by ruling only a chunk of it.

This dynamic was presaged in the Republican House from 2011 where the Republican caucus was dominated by three or four dozen hard-right lawmakers who eventually lead Speaker John Boehner to resign in despair and relief. Paul Ryan succeeded Boehner because this ‘Freedom Caucus’-plus faction lacked anything near the numbers to win a House leadership race. But they didn’t have to and perhaps didn’t even want to. They could run the party from outside the leadership. Trump’s innovation was to ape this faction and take over the party from the populist right. He was characterologically in tune and quickly made himself ideologically in tune. There was some hard going at first and breakage underneath the tires. But everyone else eventually fell in line for the same reason the party’s far-right wing got its way in the House.

I wanted to share TPM Reader RB’s more positive take on the Iowa Caucus, if not this particular execution of it. And that prompts me to add this slight qualification of my condemnation. These are great participatory civic exercises. You can see that watching them. They’re just not substitutes for elections. That may be a sort of impossible answer since if they don’t “count” people wouldn’t participate in the same way. But both can be true. We have expectations of elections. And the key one is that everyone gets a voice, an equal voice, at least on the foundational act of voting. Not just everyone in the sense of people who can’t necessarily spend a whole evening out doing this — covering differences in class, having children, working night jobs. That also means people who simply do not want to publicly announce their political beliefs or get hassled by neighbors or strangers about changing their votes.

With that, TPM Reader RB …

What a mess.

Monday, around 3 p.m., Bloomberg News’ Tyler Pager published a story: Iowa Precinct Chairs Report Issues Using Caucus App, Potentially Delaying Results.

That, it turns out, was the tip of a monstrous iceberg.

Tierney Sneed and I (but, mostly Tierney) have been keeping close tabs on the main excuses Republican senators are offering President Trump to justify their ultimate acquittal votes, which will become concrete at 4:00 p.m. ET Wednesday.