years? democracy is in play. you cannot be anymore severe or passionate. anybody that doesn t get that has got their head up their butt. certainly there is that idea that if the president is impeached here, is not removed and then wins re-election, how does that embolden him going forward when he never has to face voters again? go ahead, michael. i was going to say, you know, based on everything that s said around the table, here is where i come down on this. and this is really a question to will herd and everyone else who just have seen and heard everything that we have seen and heard over the last two weeks. tell me where your line is. tell my your line is. so if this doesn t rise to a point this is not about, you know, impeachment is unelecting a president, that s just a bs argument that people like to throw out there to distract. this is a constitutional constitutionally, you know, guaranteed process. it s given to us by our founders. if a president behaves in a way
convince americans this doesn t rise to the level of impeachment. it seemed very disjointed. if you re going to get the public on your side, didn t seem to me they had a great week in doing that. of course the biggest detractor from any messages was the president himself. when he is tweeting about a witness who is currently giving testimony. which was just dumbfounding to me. the idea that we were heading into this people were telling us you may see a different president in the process. he understands this and feels god about his position. he maybe quiet. that was never going to happen. in terms of not the legality. this is political. attempted bribe and that just because it didn t come to fruition doesn t mean it wasn t an abuse of power. how important was week one? it was incredibly important. we see the democrats laying out
witnesses. they said what they wanted to say. but the fact is when you talk about impeachment, this is the death penalty for the president. and the fact that she was removed, it wasn t done professionally, i felt badly for her, doesn t rise to the level of impeachment. so maybe next week with sondland and some of these others we hear firsthand accounts, but at this point we ve heard three people with important stories to tell, but i think it s really, really difficult at this point to think you swayed hearts and minds in those purple-red districts where you need to if to get to the point of impeachment. howard: i have a theory about the lacking of pizazz. i don t think that something as serious as impeachment has to be a scintillating tv show. this is the third round. we found out most of what they had to say. then in the second round they put out the transcripts, the democrats did, and we saw their actual words, and now they do it again for the tv cameras.
himself or contradicting himself. so the question is where he comes down on this, and i don t think anybody in washington knows. chris: we asked you for questions for the panel, and we got this on twitter from peter. a political party is using trumped the-up reasons to remove a potus, president, they don t like. what will be the long-term impact on the nation, and could this process repeat itself often? marie, how do you answer peter, and how do you answer the argument that some people are making, that jonah at least raised, that maybe the president is really bad judgment here, but this doesn t rise to the level of overturning an electionsome. democrats will have to make the argument for why it does x that s why getting all of this information out publicly in these hearings is so important. this week we will shift to people that were part of this irregular channel of policy including gordon sondland, but they will have to make the case x that s what we will see them
overheard a phone call from the president in a restaurant in which, according to this testimony, the president says, so he s going to do the investigation, meaning zelensky of ukraine. sondland replies that he loves your ass, he ll do whatever you want. and sondland also said trump only cares about the big stuff, meaning investigating the bidens. the new the new york times sayt proves trump is preoccupied with this stuff. it just took me 30 seconds to explain it, but he wasn t even on the call. he overheard this call, apparently, and we may hear from him in open testimony, but, you know, the fact that the president is preoccupied with something or the fact that we don t like the policy the president is pursuing, again, doesn t rise to the level of impeachment. so the democrats, and, you know, and kristin mentioned, you know, they moved from this idea to a quid pro quo, they started moving to bribery, right? they did that based on focus groups in purple states where people are sayi