GOP senators promise to sit as biased jurors in a rigged trial. How is this not a bad thing?

Sometimes I think I'm going to wake up one of these mornings and find out that Donald Trump and his administration were less a bad dream than a funny one, my subconscious having a laugh at reality by staging an elaborate spoof.

No such luck. Donald Trump is all too real- and intelligent people (though a minority of them) are eagerly buying what he's peddling (or pretending to).

And no aspect of this dark comedy is more bizarre than Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and other leading Republican senators openly and frankly promising to violate the oaths they will take to do impartial justice and see to it that the upcoming impeachment trial is rigged.

It's going to be a farce. The Republican leadership comes right out and promises that. I've long believed that the 2020 presidential election will be the acid test of whether America in the 21st Century is capable of governing itself; that Donald Trump has been so grotesque, so openly dishonest, and so plainly not quite right in the head that it would be unthinkable for any nation that hasn't lost its collective mind to re-elect him, even as the result of another constitutional fluke like the one that put him in the White House, to begin with.

But we may get a test earlier than that. Whatever anybody thinks of the articles of impeachment against President Trump (and at it's hard to see how anyone who can read could honestly not agree with at least the second one, charging a president who has openly done everything possible to obstruct not only a special prosecutor's investigation but the work of the committees considering possible impeachment charges against him; the first is only slightly less of a slam-dunk), how in the world can anybody not be bothered by jurors who openly state before the trial even begins that they will ignore the evidence because they have already made up their minds how they will vote? 

The reaction of the public will in itself be an acid test of the competence of the American voting public to fulfill its own part in the constitutional process. If it's ok with this, it will be proof that- as tends to be the case in nations in which a constant barrage of government propaganda coupled with cries of treason against dissenters confuses the public about whether the truth is even knowable- we have become not so much dishonest jurors as irrational ones only ten or eleven months from the time when it will be we who are called upon to pass judgment on our most corrupt and most incompetent president.

Oh. And before anybody says it, yeah. I've listened carefully, and my mind is made up, too. But it could hypothetically be changed by new evidence submitted at the trial- and if I were a United States senator about to serve under oath as a juror in a presidential impeachment trial, I would certainly have enough sense and enough shame not to publicly declare my bias and my intention to violate my oath in advance.