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
don t put it on speaker phone, that might disprove your point. michael steele, let me ask you about the republican approach which was a revelation to a lot of people and why david holmes was there yesterday, which was to say, you know, what else recount for us chapter and verse everything that was in that conversation? oh, you couldn t remember? why did it enough to asap rocky in sweden? he said i heard what i heard about ukraine and then he moved on to a different topic. republicans didn t have a lot of places to go with david holmes yesterday. no, they didn t because he, you know, it was very clear that he was in the space with the ambassador. the ambassador basically confirmed what holmes was going to say before he said it because he acknowledged that the call took place and in a public, open space. that it was loud enough for a third party to hear. and homes was that third party. the fact that republicans not just with holmes but with hill,
like foreign policy being run this way, but i don t see enough here to remove an elected president from office. it s an argument republicans may have made from the beginning, may have been more compelling, but they couldn t do it because the president was denying everything. is that a winning argument, something that can carry the day? yes. bad stuff but not impeachable? it s the only argument. to your point they should have done it from the beginning. hey, look because what we ve learned about this president is not only will people accept playing outside the lines, that part of it is part of his brand. it s like, yeah, this is a president that pushes hard, made a mistake, certainly should not be removed. i don t want to betray the voters who voted for him. you want him out of office, vote him. and it s actually a if you re not an absolutist about the constitution, if you re not, like i said, what we do for a living and follow this, if you re an average joe voter out there, y
pursue that testimony, susan, from john bolton and mick mulvaney and from mike pompeo, in other words, extending these hearings. or we ve seen what we need to see, let s get on the record and let s go ahead and vote before christmas is what democrats are arguing. do you think we ll see john bolton s testimony? not as yet. but it doesn t mean it won t happen if the doesn t mean that it can t be requested further down the line. it doesn t mean that we said this last hour, that the hearings are necessarily over. i m not sure that they are because there s a lot of threads to still pull at that. but, i think to jeffrey s point and ruth just to push back a little bit, is i think that everything is known meaning what else are we going to find about the quid pro quo? we know it happened. if john bolton testifies were we re still going to know the same thing. we may learn more, but we ll still basically have the same facts out there that the president used his power for political gain. it
i don t want to overstate it, but it just seems to be that everything is known at this point. everything is known over and over again. we heard the same narrative, the same quid pro quo narrative. and, you know, the only the only good thing in this whole process, to me, is that the american people have been allowed to see some great public servants who ordinarily don t get any attention for the good work that they do on behalf of the american people. jonathan, one of the things dr. hill did right out of the box, we got a preview of it when we saw her opening statement about 24 hours ago was to go right at republicans on the committee and say, you re pedali peddling a fiction. i study these things, i know she s things better than you sitting up there, she didn t say it that way, but it was russian that meddled and by meddling these fictions of ukraine, you re helping russia with their