Our live coverage here.

From the closing argument of impeachment manager Madeleine Dean (D-PA):

For those who say we need to get past this, we need to come together, we need to unify, if we don’t set this right and call it what it was, the highest of constitutional crimes by the president of the United States, the past will not be past. The past will become our future.

Correction: I initially misidentified Dean.

Well, that didn’t last long.

Dems seemed to have seized the advantage, backed by five GOP senators, to present at least some witnesses in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The fierce reaction of GOP senators to what House impeachment managers and Dem senators wanted to do testified to the the advantage Dems had taken hold of.

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Big unexpected news this morning as the Senate has voted 55-45, with five Republicans joining all 50 Democrats, to consider witnesses subpoenas. This was on the heels of last night’s CNN report that put into sharper focus the phone call between President Trump and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) during the Capitol siege.

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The story we had ready if Trump had won re-election.

Also, special after-the-fact reaction from one of the experts on authoritarianism we had talked to for that story.

Trump’s final pardons include a TPM special: Duke Cunningham!

TPM Reader DW is watching the impeachment debate: “While we’re treated to this feast of false equivalency from Republicans, it’s worth remembering that the only officers killed during BLM protests last summer were shot by a right-wing extremist engaging in a false flag attack.”

TPM Reader SC: “This is a Republican Benghazi, except that not only does the Republican Party get to be the cavalry that didn’t show up they get to be the terrorists, too. Very efficient.”

Thanks to Tom Brokaw, we’ve been more than a little oversaturated in the veneration of the World War II generation. But the dwindling surviving members of that cohort have endured one helluva roller coaster from fighting fascism abroad to what happened on Wednesday.

TPM Reader WK checks in:

First, thanks, as ever, for yr excellent coverage and insight.

Also wanted to comment briefly on the current state of things.

My husband and I have just returned from one of our frequent visits with his 93 yo mother and her 95 yo sister who live in a retirement community in our Pennsylvania town.

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TPM Reader SS responds to my puzzling over the festooned, over-the-top, costumed insurrection:

Thanks for all your commentary and coverage on TPM, I’m a longtime reader (etc etc) — you guys do just vital, crucial work.

On your question today: “One of the elements of the Trump era I struggle with the most is how to explain to future generations that the threat to democracy arrived in a such a tawdry, low brow, gaudy and comical way. You can’t separate the genuine threat to democracy from the reality TV theatrics. The Capitol Police officer taking a fire extinguisher to the head and the horned fur cap are part of the same surreal tableau.”

This is all the aesthetics of dogwhistle politics. I’ve written about this in academic circles, but basically (as Josh has noted many times), dogwhistling relies on deniability “we’re not really racist, we’re not really fascist, we’re just reasonable people making reasonable political claims in time-honored ways.” There has to be some mechanism of concealment, or there’s no deniability.
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