Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council and is the first White House aide to testify in the House impeachment inquiry. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It’s standard practice for officers testifying on Capitol Hill to wear their uniform.

Four witnesses were called to testify on the third day of public hearings into the House impeachment inquiry. Of the four, Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer and a US Army lieutenant colonel, was the only witness to come in full military garb — an outfit that placed Vindman’s military career on full display.

It’s standard practice for military officers testifying on Capitol Hill, but the dress uniform became a flashpoint on Tuesday.

Vindman is the top Ukraine expert on the NSC, which advises the president on national security and foreign policy matters, and has served in American embassies in Ukraine and Russia.

As Vox reported, that makes Vindman the first White House aide to testify in the inquiry. Vindman said he has not personally interacted with President Donald Trump, but was on the line for Trump’s two phone calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in April and July.

Despite his background as a decorated veteran, Vindman has been criticized by Republicans and conservatives on cable television for complying with the House subpoena to testify. On Monday, the night before Vindman’s testimony, Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, attacked his credibility as a witness, the Washington Post reported. Fox host Laura Ingraham and CNN commentator Sean Duffy have also questioned Vindman’s patriotism and national loyalty through insinuations about his immigrant background. (Vindman’s family fled the Soviet Union as refugees 40 years ago.)

On Tuesday, Republican attorney Steve Castor also used his time to ask Vindman about whether he was offered the post of Ukrainian defense minister. This line of questioning seems to be part of a conservative effort to discredit Vindman’s allegiance to the US.

The uniform, then, became a focus point for Republicans who believe the soldier wants to look more authoritative, and another line of attack for the GOP to question Vindman’s credibility.

Dressed in uniform, Vindman emphasized how the Army is nonpartisan. Republicans tried to paint him as un-American anyway.

Vindman, a Purple Heart recipient, previously wore his decorated Army uniform to the closed-door hearings in late October. While his outfit is more of a formality than a personal choice, the uniform could create the perception of credibility, especially among the public. Regardless, Vindman seemed intent on publicly presenting himself as an Army veteran in accordance to his testimony as a national security staffer.

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From the start, Vindman sought to highlight his work as a public servant in the opening statement: “I have dedicated my entire professional life to the United States of America,” he said.

“The uniform I wear today is that of the United States Army … We do not serve any particular political party, we serve the nation. I am humbled to come before you today as one of many who serve in the most distinguished and able military in the world,” Vindman added.

The Washington Examiner, a conservative news site, reported that members of the military who serve with the NSC typically wear suits, citing various unnamed military officials who disagreed with Vindman’s outfit. There’s a case for that: active-duty troops can wear civilian business attire if given a waiver to do so. It’s unclear if Vindman was given permission to wear a suit instead of his uniform to the hearing.

Trump’s former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has worn his Army uniform for some official duties in the White House, according to the Military Times in 2017. McMaster’s choice of dress was “an apparent break from other senior military officers who’ve served as high-profile political appointees while remaining on active duty.”

And again, that’s in the daily business of the NSC — not in front of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Vindman is still an active-duty Army officer, and according to retired naval aviator Guy Snodgrass in an interview with Cheddar, “it’s [Vindman’s] obligation, in accordance with his oath of office, to [testify] in uniform.”

When referred to as “Mr. Vindman” during his testimony by Rep. Devin Nunes, Vindman interrupted to ask the Republican representative to use the proper title of lieutenant colonel when addressing him.

The uniform-based attacks were part of a broader hit on Vindman’s integrity. Republicans questioned the officer’s loyalty to the US because he speaks Ukrainian and emigrated from that country to America with his father. They targeted how Ukraine’s government thrice offered him the role of defense minister, which Vindman each time declined. And they painted him as a deep state operative looking to thwart Trump’s foreign policy.

They proved none of it. But when their defense of Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine lacks any merit, going after a witness is all they really have left.

Vindman isn’t the first NSC staffer to testify in full military uniform

Collins, the Republican lawmaker who criticized Vindman, doesn’t think that wearing a uniform would shield the NSC staffer from tough questions at the hearing, the Post reported. “I don’t think it shielded Oliver North from hard questions,” Collins told reporters.

Oliver North was a key witness in the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, which was part of a congressional inquiry into whether President Ronald Reagan’s administration used profits from weapons sales to Iran to secretly fund a right-wing rebellious coup in Nicaragua.

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Tens of millions of people across the nation tuned in to watch the Iran-Contra hearings; North, a staffer on the National Security Council and a key decision maker in the events of the scandal, was one of the most anticipated witnesses.

While testifying, North wore a green Marine Corps uniform, decorated with six rows of service ribbons and a White House staff badge.

During his testimony, North admitted that he had lied and misled Congress and the American public by falsifying official documents to protect his superiors and the president. Still, his testimony — somewhat influenced by his appearance in full military garb — resonated with the public.

A Washington Post columnist wrote that North “cleverly projected himself as a brave, America-loving Marine who put the nation’s interest above that of even his family.” And it worked: “An ABC news poll cited by The Post at the time found that 92 percent of the public thought that North did well in defending his actions; 64 percent came to see him as a victim and not a villain in the scandal.”

Arguably, the significance of North’s uniform was not the ribbons that reflected his military career and administrative achievements (his decorations were “no more distinguished than what might be seen on many lieutenant colonels’ chests,” the Sun Sentinel reported in 1987). It was the White House badge he wore despite being fired from his NSC post by Reagan as the scandal publicly unfolded.

The Los Angeles Times reported, “Once that badge was reserved for military officers actually serving on the President’s staff. But a recent rule change allows former White House staff officers, like North, to continue wearing the badge — even though his actions helped plunge President Reagan into the worst crisis of his presidency.”

North’s testimony in full military uniform swayed public opinion in his favor, despite his direct involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Vindman — a witness on Trump’s call to Ukraine who has no established connection with the President — has faced attacks on his credibility and patriotism, on top of his decision to wear a military uniform.

To his detractors, it’s a disgraceful choice to don a military outfit while testifying against the expected chain of command. To his supporters, it’s a symbol of Vindman’s patriotism and duty to his country beyond partisan politics.

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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) questions top US diplomat to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr., November 13, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Republicans have repeatedly attempted to shift the focus onto the whistleblower to undermine the substance of the allegations. Tuesday was no different.

For weeks now, Republicans have said they’d like to unmask the whistleblower who filed a complaint about President Donald Trump’s conduct with Ukraine, despite concerns that it could put that individual at risk.

And during a public impeachment hearing on Tuesday, they kept up this push. Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, pressed Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman on the briefing he gave about a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to someone in the Intelligence Community.

House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff emphasized repeatedly, however, that the hearing would not be used to expose the whistleblower.

Shifting the focus to the whistleblower — and his credibility — was one (of many) diversion tactics employed by the president and congressional Republicans almost as soon as the complaint came to light in September.

GOP lawmakers have slammed the complaint as “secondhand” and “hearsay” in a bid to question the allegations that are detailed by the whistleblower, while Trump has suggested that this person is a partisan actor. He’s led the charge in calling for the exposure of the whistleblower’s identity, arguing that he should be able to face his accuser.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Beyond Republicans’ political motivations for pushing this argument, however, there’s little reason to name the whistleblower, since the impeachment inquiry is no longer really about him: The allegations listed in the original complaint have already been corroborated by other witnesses — not to mention Trump himself.

What’s more, whistleblower protection laws, including those that govern the Intelligence Community, enable government employees to file whistleblower complaints confidentially specifically to protect them from potential blowback. As NPR notes, though, there is no law that bars a member of Congress or the president from publicly naming the whistleblower.

In their attempts to undermine the complaint against Trump, Republican efforts to expose the whistleblower could have a massive chilling effect: They could endanger the person who has been named and they could deter future whistleblowers from coming forward.

Putting the focus on the whistleblower is one way Republicans are aiming to divert attention from Trump

Since Republicans have struggled to defend the substance of the accusations against Trump, they’ve sought to redirect the focus toward other aspects of the investigation including the process behind the inquiry, Hunter Biden’s ties to a Ukrainian corporation, and, of course, the whistleblower.

“The whistleblower is a disgrace to our country. A disgrace. And the whistleblower, because of that, should be revealed,” Trump has said.

Trump’s allies have taken a variety of approaches to call out the whistleblower: They’ve floated names in the closed-door committee depositions and at least one has posted an article on social media that names a specific individual. The whistleblower’s attorneys have declined to confirm his identity.

Republicans are actively focusing on the whistleblower in an effort to sow doubt about both the legitimacy of the complaint and the rationale for filing it. “One of the ways you determine someone’s credibility to determine what their motivation is, what kind of bias they have, is they need to be under oath answering your questions,” Rep. Jim Jordan said during a Fox News appearance.

As their logic goes, if the whistleblower came in with a preconceived bias, that could affect how reliable they are as a witness to wrongdoing.

The party’s dedication to protecting the president makes sense given his ongoing popularity with members of the Republican base, but the emphasis on the whistleblower specifically is something that’s faced resistance from GOP lawmakers as well.

Although lawmakers including Sen. Rand Paul and Jordan have been out front in the push to make the whistleblower publicly known, a number of Republicans have said that the individual’s identity should be protected.

As the law currently stands, the Inspector General who the whistleblower reports the complaint to is required to keep the person’s identity anonymous unless they need to share it as they process the complaint. However, as experts told NPR, there is nothing in the statute that directly limits the president or a member of Congress from divulging the whistleblower’s name.

Several Republican Senators have argued that lawmakers shouldn’t expose the whistleblower. “This person appears to have followed the whistleblower protection laws and ought to be heard out and protected. We should always work to respect whistleblowers’ requests for confidentiality,” Sen. Chuck Grassley said in an October statement.

Sens. Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and John Thune are among those who told The Hill that the whistleblower protections should stay intact.

“Whistleblowers are entitled to protection under the law … To try to reveal the identity of this individual is contrary to the intent of the whistleblower law,” Collins told The Hill.

This could have some serious consequences

There are a lot of potential consequences from unmasking the whistleblower — few of them good. He could face professional backlash in the form of a firing, demotion, or removal of security clearance. Additionally, the whistleblower might experience personal threats to his safety, a chief reason their counsel has said they would prefer responding to written questions instead of providing in-person testimony.

“As a direct consequence of the President’s irresponsible rhetoric and behavior, my client’s physical safety became a significant concern, prompting us to instead state our willingness to only answer written interrogatories,” Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower’s attorney, wrote in a letter to White House legal counsel, calling on Trump to stop his attacks.

In the past, Trump’s targeting of lawmakers including Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have resulted in a surge of death threats aimed at the two women. It’s possible this could happen with the whistleblower as well, and it’s among the many reasons he’d like to keep his identity secret.

If exposed, the whistleblower also has limited recourse, professionally, because he is a member of the intelligence community. Unlike whistleblowers from elsewhere in the government, he legally isn’t able to publicly discuss professional retaliation he might encounter because of how sensitive his role is — and the onus to challenge such blowback would be on him.

Unmasking the whistleblower has become a partisan rallying cry — since the allegations in the complaint have already been corroborated

While many Republicans continue to use the whistleblower as a flashpoint, the allegations he raised have already been corroborated both by other witnesses and, in part, by the president.

That means the ploy to expose the whistleblower feels much less substantive and much more like a crutch for Republican attacks, Vox’s Andrew Prokop recently told Today, Explained:

It seems more of an effort at retaliation rather than a good faith effort to check their information, because the person’s information has already been completely confirmed at this point by all the documents and testimony from other witnesses that have come out.

The whistleblower’s identity seems pretty irrelevant at this point, but Trump really wants a villain and he is trying to put a face on this whistleblower to have a new hate figure for conservative media to fulminate about deep state conspiracies against the president.

The chief allegations in the original complaint centered on how the president had asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of 2020 rival Joe Biden. This claim has already been directly corroborated by a summary the White House has released of the call and by multiple witnesses who’ve testified in House Democrats’ inquiry.

The whistleblower complaint also stated that White House officials sought to place the original call transcript in a secure server, a move that’s been confirmed by testimony from White House Ukraine adviser Alexander Vindman.

Ultimately, the whistleblower’s identity doesn’t change the revelations that have come out about Trump attempting to pressure Zelensky. It does, however, give Republicans something specific to fixate on as they try to cast doubt on the accusations of wrongdoing faced by the president.

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Democratic presidential candidates gather for a debate in Ohio. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Warren’s new health care plan and the impeachment inquiry are set to take center stage.

The fifth Democratic presidential debate — which will once again feature 10 candidates — will be on Wednesday, November 20, from 9 to 11 ET at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, and will be broadcast by MSNBC.

The debate will be co-hosted by the Washington Post and will include an all-female panel of moderators, something that’s only happened twice before in presidential primary debates. Here’s where you can watch the live stream.

The debate is taking place as the Democratic race has hit a holding pattern: two new candidates, Deval Patrick and Michael Bloomberg, have recently signaled plans to jump in, while polling has remained relatively steady for the rest of the field.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is hanging onto a slight lead, as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders continue to trail him. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has experienced a polling surge, though his campaign has stumbled in its attempts to reach out to and win over African American voters.

Wednesday’s debate marks a key opportunity for candidates who aren’t polling as highly to attempt a breakout moment, as well as a chance for the frontrunners to further establish themselves. Candidates are expected to duke it out over health care once more in light of Warren’s new plan to fund for Medicare-for-all — and the ongoing impeachment inquiry is set to hang over the whole night.

To qualify for this debate, all ten candidates had to reach a higher threshold than past debates when it came to polling and fundraising. In addition to securing at least 165,000 individual donors, they were required to reach 3 percent in four Democratic National Committee (DNC) approved surveys, or 5 percent in two DNC approved polls from the four earliest primary and caucus states.

The candidates who’ve qualified are:

• Former Vice President Joe Biden
• Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren
• Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders
• California Sen. Kamala Harris
• New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker
• South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg
• Entrepreneur Andrew Yang
• Billionaire and climate advocate Tom Steyer
• Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar
• Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

The state of the race, explained

The top three has remained consistent: Biden, Warren, and Sanders still comprise the top three, in that order, in national polls. The current RealClearPolitics polling average has Biden maintaining the lead at 27 percent, Warren in second at 20 percent, and Sanders coming in at 19 percent. Although polling between Biden and Warren tightened significantly in early October, Biden has pulled ahead slightly for the time being, while Sanders has seen a small uptick since the last debate.

There’s been another Buttigieg surge: Beyond the leading contenders, Buttigieg has seen a small but substantial national polling surge, coupled with strong support in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. In part due to his track record with black constituents as South Bend mayor, however, Buttigieg has struggled to pick up support from African American voters.

A recent misstep in which he promoted his Douglass Plan (a group of policies meant to address the concerns of African Americans) by aligning it with black leaders who were not endorsing his candidacy, has further drawn attention to this issue. Questions about Buttigieg’s support for and among African Americans are something he will likely have to address at the debate.

Lower polling candidates are struggling to hit the debate stage: Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, a candidate who had gained momentum after an early debate performance, did not qualify for this month’s debate. Others, including Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, also missed the necessary cutoff, a sign that more and more candidates may not be able to use the debate stage as a platform as requirements get stricter.

This debate is the last one before the field (probably) winnows even more

With the Iowa caucus roughly three months away, the 2020 Democratic field has now begun to winnow … while also somehow expanding at the same time.

Even as candidates including former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Tim Ryan have dropped out, others like former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick have entered. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is also eying a potential run. These announcements have muddled the race some, and underscored how fluid it could still be.

According to an October poll from Rasmussen Reports, 28 percent of voters are still undecided, and a high proportion of voters in early states like South Carolina have said they could still change their vote.

Voters are likely paying closer attention to the November and December debates given the fast-approaching primaries, which kick off in February. Candidates face even more stringent qualification requirements for the December debate when they’ll have to hit 200,000 unique donors as well as 4 percent in four DNC-approved polls or 6 percent in two early-state polls.

Although there’s still quite a bit of time before voters officially head to the polls, support behind the top candidates is beginning to solidify, and middle-tier candidates like Harris, Buttigieg, and Booker are facing a tighter window to shore up their backing. For candidates who don’t make the stage at all, including Castro, the debates could also seriously limit the exposure they need to advance.

This is not to say that candidates who fail to make the November stage are sure to drop out. Candidates like Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam and former Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak have not made any of the debates so far, and have chosen to continue their campaigns. However, entering the Iowa caucus without the momentum and name recognition debate appearances bring makes winning that contest a difficult proposition at best.

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Alexander Vindman, National Security Council Director for European Affairs, testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on November 19, 2019. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Perhaps the grossest moment of the impeachment hearings to date.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, one of the key witnesses in the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings, is an Iraq war veteran and Purple Heart recipient who has served in the US Army for the past 20 years.

He also immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979, when he was 4 years old — a fact that the attorney for House Republicans played on during a line of questioning during Vindman’s Tuesday morning’s hearing that seemed to imply he was unpatriotic and untrustworthy.

Vindman is important because he was a high-level US official on Ukraine who listened to President Donald Trump’s now-infamous July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and, afterward, raised concerns with his superiors about the appropriateness of Trump’s “demand” (his words) that Ukraine investigate the Bidens. As a veteran, he’s one of the Democrats’ most credible witnesses — proof that Trump’s behavior really was troubling. It’s vital for the Republican cause to discredit him.

Steve Castor, the Republican attorney, tried to do this by asking Vindman about a visit to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration earlier this year. He specifically focused on a job offer Vindman received from Oleksandr Danylyuk, the former head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. Apparently, Danylyuk offered Vindman an opportunity to become Ukraine’s defense minister three times during the trip — and, each time, Vindman declined.

“Upon returning, I notified chain of command and the appropriate counterintelligence folks about this, the offer,” Vindman said.

But Castor wasn’t satisfied. He continued to press Vindman on whether he ever considered the offer, resulting in an exchange in which he appeared to call Vindman’s patriotism into question:

CASTOR: Ukraine’s a country that’s experienced a war with Russia. Certainly their minister of defense is a pretty key position for the Ukrainians. President Zelensky, Mr. Danylyuk, to bestow that honor — at least asking you — that was a big honor, correct?

VINDMAN: I think it would be a great honor, and frankly I’m aware of service members that have left service to help nurture developing democracies in that part of the world. It was an Air Force officer that became minister of defense, but I’m an American. I came here when I was a toddler. And I immediately dismissed these offers. Did not entertain them.

CASTOR: When he made this offer to you initially, did you leave the door open? Was there a reason he had to come back and ask a second or third time?

VINDMAN: Counselor, you know what, the whole notion is rather comical that I was being asked to consider whether I’d want to be the minister of defense. I did not leave the door open at all.

CASTOR: Okay. But it is pretty funny for a lieutenant colonel of the United States Army, which really isn’t that senior, to be offered that illustrious a position. When he made this offer to you, was he speaking in English or Ukrainian?

VINDMAN: He is an absolutely flawless English speaker.

Castor is arguing that Vindman’s loyalties were strained by repeated job offers from the Ukrainians, but also that Vindman was offered a prestigious position that he doesn’t deserve (he “isn’t really that senior”) seemingly because of his background. Castor then highlights Vindman’s Ukrainian language skills, reminding everyone that he’s foreign-born. The insinuation, that Vindman’s background makes him an unreliable witness to Trump’s malfeasance, is reasonably clear.

Vindman himself brought up his immigrant background in his opening testimony to highlight his loyalty to the United States, explaining his decision to join the military as a way of giving back to a country that took him in after he fled Soviet totalitarianism. It was a moving story, a preemptive defense of his commitment to his country that by all rights should not have been necessary.

And yet, at the end of the questioning, Castor all but openly accused Vindman of being compromised.

“Did you ever think that possibly, if this information got out, that it might create at least the perception of a conflict?” Castor asked. “The Ukrainians thought so highly of you to offer the defense ministry post. … But on the other hand, you’re responsible for Ukrainian policy at the national security counsel.”

Castor never outright brings up Vindman’s Ukrainian origin (or his Jewish background), but he didn’t really need to. The line of questioning served only to suggest that a Ukrainian-born immigrant cannot be trusted to be loyal to the United States even if he was wounded fighting for his country.

This line of argument was deployed by some in the right-wing media when Vindman first emerged as a key witness, like Fox Host Laura Ingraham, but seemed largely abandoned after a significant public backlash.

Castor seemed to be working to bring it back into the conversation, a move correctly diagnosed by Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) in his questioning of Vindman later in the hearing: The question, he said, “was designed exclusively to give the right-wing media the opportunity to question your loyalties.”

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Vindman before his testimony on Tuesday. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Nunes’s line of questioning illustrated how Republicans wanted to talk about anything but Trump’s conduct.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of the early portion of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman’s testimony to impeachment investigators on Tuesday came when he clapped back at ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA) for calling him “Mr. Vindman” instead of by his military title.

“Ranking member, it’s Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, please,” Vindman said.

But the broader context of that moment is significant, coming as it did amid a line of questioning from Nunes that seemed aimed at outing the intelligence community whistleblower who first sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Nunes did not defend Trump’s conduct on the merits. Instead, he used his time to push the very same conspiracy theories about the Bidens that Trump tried to leverage the Ukrainian government into validating with investigations, grill both Vindman and Pence aide Jennifer Williams about whether they leaked to the media, and raise questions about why Vindman was reluctant to answer questions that could out the whistleblower.

According to the whistleblower complaint, the whistleblower himself was not on the call, but spoke to “multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call.” That would include National Security Council officials like Vindman. And that appears to be why Republican questioners asked whom Vindman had talked to about the call.

Vindman said the only two individuals he told about the call outside the NSC staff, both of whom were fully cleared and needed to know, were State Department official George Kent, and a member of the intelligence community. (The whistleblower is reportedly a CIA officer.)

So Nunes demanded to know the name of that person — but Vindman’s lawyer objected, and Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) cut off the questioning, deeming it an effort to out the whistleblower.

Vindman said he does not “know” who the whistleblower is, but it is possible he suspects the whistleblower is the person he talked to. Another possibility is that he is just generally avoiding naming members of the intelligence community, since it’s well-known that the whistleblower is one.

Although, as Schiff pointed out during Vindman’s exchange with Nunes, the whistleblower is legally protected from reprisals, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t face retaliation — professional or personal — if his name became known. Moreover, Nunes’s line of questioning is beside the point. The whistleblower’s complaint about how Trump tried to leverage the Ukrainian government into doing political favors for him has been corroborated both by the White House and by a number of witnesses who have testified before impeachment investigators.

As unseemly as Nunes’s line of questioning was, it arguably wasn’t the low point of Tuesday’s hearing for Republicans. Later on, Republican counsel Steve Castor highlighted Vindman’s good relations with Ukrainian government officials in an apparent effort to draw patriotism into question.

Vindman, during his powerful opening statement, emphasized that he came forward to government officials regarding his concerns about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine out of a sense of duty to the country.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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Movies were short. How did it change?

Why are movies about two hours long? In this episode of Vox Almanac, Vox’s Phil Edwards researches the history of movies — and discovers the Italian silent film classic that changed all movies forever.

In the 1900s, movies were typically around 15 minutes long — that was the length of one reel (depending on playback speed and a few other variables). But in 1913, that changed significantly thanks to the blockbuster Quo Vadis — a two-hour epic that wasn’t just long, but had blockbuster ambitions.

Quo Vadis involved huge stunts, thousands of extras, and real Roman locations, taking movies to a scale little before seen. When it premiered, instead of playing as one of many short films in nickelodeons, it debuted in big concert halls and other prestigious venues. That led to a record box office and an industry-changing trend that started with D.W. Griffith and spread elsewhere.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s Almanac series on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

Further reading

A History of Narrative Film by David A. Cook: This book provides a good overview of film history.

Film Before Griffith by John Fell: This book chronicles all the films that influenced movies before D.W. Griffith came on the stage.

The Silent Cinema by Liam O’Leary: O’Leary provides another good overview, this one of the international silent film scene.

The Griffith Project: Many silent films are lost, so anthologies like these, which describe each film and include data on length, are useful.

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Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asks a question during the House Intelligence Committee hearing featuring testimony by Joseph Maguire, acting director of national intelligence, on a whistleblower complaint about a phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in Rayburn Building on Thursday, September 26, 2019. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

The three-term Congresswoman has emerged as Republicans’ new face of the impeachment hearings.

A “new Republican star” — and Democratic foil — is having a moment during the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings: Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Stefanik, the only Republican woman on the Intelligence Committee, has established a much higher profile this past month as she takes on a central role in the impeachment process.

Just last Friday, she made waves by using a misleading procedural stunt to accuse Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff of cutting her off — an argument that directly contradicted established House rules. During the same hearing, her pointed questioning of former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch stood out as far more effective than that of ranking member Devin Nunes or Republican Counsel Stephen Castor.

Since the start of the impeachment hearings, Stefanik, one of the youngest women ever elected to Congress, has become an increasingly prominent GOP figure. A longtime moderate who’s pushed back on President Donald Trump about the government shutdown and tax cuts in the past, Stefanik’s rhetoric has become more partisan as it relates to impeachment — and that’s garnered positive feedback from some factions of the party, including the president himself.

“Nothing rises to the level of impeachable offenses,” Stefanik said during a press conference last week. “This is wishful thinking by the Democrats.” Over the weekend, Trump tweeted his compliments:

Stefanik’s strong Trump backing is likely a strategic play for her reelection campaign in 2020: While New York’s 21st district previously voted for former President Barack Obama, it’s since seen a major swing in favor of the GOP and Trump in recent years.

But it’s also a sign of how polarizing this inquiry has become for both parties, Catholic University political science professor Matthew Green tells Vox. Stefanik’s stance on impeachment underscores just how closely members of the party are tying themselves to Trump during this inquiry — and sets her up as a major target for Democrats in 2020.

Stefanik is a longtime moderate, though her tone on impeachment has been more partisan

Stefanik’s recent performance has garnered widespread praise from GOP lawmakers including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and of course, the president. In the past two weeks, Trump has mentioned or retweeted posts about her eight times.

But even before the impeachment proceedings, Stefanik was viewed as a young, dynamic member of the party — one who staked out a position that’s closer to the center. Previously, she’s worked on policies such as maintaining funding for rural hospitals and boosting caregiver support for veterans.

“For those of us in New York, it’s not surprising,” says Republican strategist Jessica Proud. “She’s been seen as a real rising Republican star in New York politics.”

Beyond the Intelligence panel, Stefanik currently sits on both the House Armed Services and Education and Labor committees, and she’s led the effort to elect more Republican women to the House even as other members of the party establishment have chafed against this. Last year, Stefanik urged the party to increase the diversity of its representatives and to get engaged at the primary level — clashing with other lawmakers in the process.

When fellow Republican Rep. Tom Emmer called this effort a “mistake,” she had a decisive response: “Newsflash, I wasn’t asking for permission.”

Stefanik was first elected to Congress in 2014 at the age of 30, beating Democrat Aaron Woolf by double digits for an open seat previously held by a Democratic incumbent. Prior to her election, she worked as a staffer for former President George W. Bush’s administration and was known for her work with former Speaker Paul Ryan, leading his vice presidential debate prep.

“She had never run for office before, beat someone who had run previously and had a lot of money, and really proved her mettle and capabilities when she was a real unknown,” says Proud.

In the years since she’s taken office, Stefanik has focused her policies on the Fort Drum military base in her district, and confronted Trump on multiple issues such as his withdrawal of US troops from Syria.

Stefanik’s willingness to defend Trump during the impeachment process seems to mark a change in tone with her previous breaks, and it also underscores how partisan impeachment has become. In the vote to approve impeachment inquiry procedure, for example, not a single Republican broke with the party and voted in favor of it.

“It shows how the partisan nature of the impeachment hearings make it difficult for lawmakers of either party to take a more moderate or centrist public position,” Catholic University’s Green told Vox, adding that Stefanik’s positions reflected the support of many voters in her district.

Stefanik, meanwhile, argues that her efforts on impeachment don’t contradict her other policy positions.

“I have one of the top 10 percent most bipartisan records in this House and one of the most independent records,” she told the Washington Post. “But when it comes to constitutional matters, we should focus on the facts. We should not let this be a partisan attack the way Adam Schiff is conducting himself.”

Stefanik’s growing profile — and alignment with Trump — is firing up Republicans and Democrats

Stefanik’s growing role in the impeachment proceedings has catalyzed an outpouring of support from Republicans, and vehement opposition from Democrats ahead of her own race for reelection in 2020.

Following Friday’s impeachment hearing, Stefanik used both social media and a press conference to defend the president and question Schiff over the committee process, even though he was simply adhering to procedure. Standing next to Jordan at the press briefing, she reiterated an argument that was founded on a misrepresentation of the rules, arguing that Republicans were “muzzled” by Schiff.

The focus on Stefanik during Friday’s hearing was also seen by some as a way to diffuse the optics of a predominately male panel scrutinizing Yovanovitch, who faced attacks from Trump during the panel, a suggestion Stefanik rejected in her interview with the Post. Nonetheless, Stefanik’s presence has highlighted how few women there are on the Republican side of the aisle.

“The obvious is that she stands out as a young woman in a party dominated by old white men,” Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman said of Stefanik. Democrats, though they have significantly more representation, similarly aren’t close to parity either — just three of the party’s 13 House Intelligence members are women.

Even as Stefanik’s performance in the hearing has prompted praise from conservatives, it’s simultaneously made her a target for Democrats. Wasserman notes that Stefanik is likely in a positive position for the 2020 race, since many of the voters who did not turn out in 2018 — when she won by a 14 point margin — are likely to lean Republican.

“The political reality in her district, despite what Democrats would hope, is that it has shifted in favor of Donald Trump,” he says.

Stefanik’s opponent, Tedra Cobb, meanwhile, has seen strong fundraising off of Stefanik’s ties with Trump and the impeachment inquiry. Cobb raised $1 million in the days since the Friday impeachment hearing.

The spotlight on Stefanik and Cobb could direct further resources and attention from both parties to the New York race. At this time, Cook Political Report rates the district as “Solid Republican.”

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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

“Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.”

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified Tuesday that he was concerned about President Donald Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling it “improper for the president of the United States to demand a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen and political opponent.”

That wasn’t a surprise: It’s what Vindman said in closed door-testimony last month.

But what really stood out in Vindman’s public testimony before the House Intelligence Committee was his moving conclusion, where he recounted his military service and own family’s journey to America as refugees from the former Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago.

“When my father was 47 years old, he left behind his entire life and the only home he had ever known to start over in the United States so that his three sons could have better, safer lives,” Vindman told the committee. “His courageous decision inspired a deep sense of gratitude in my brothers and myself and instilled in us a sense of duty and service. All three of us have served or are currently serving in the military. Our collective military service is a special part of our family’s story in America.”

As he prepared for hours of questioning Tuesday — including partisan attacks from Republican defenders of Trump — Vindman convincingly argued that his presence before Congress was part of the American dream.

In Russia, Vindman said, his “act of expressing my concerns to the chain of command in an official and private channel would have severe personal and professional repercussions and offering public testimony involving the president would surely cost me my life.”

For that, he said, he was grateful for his father’s decision to come to the US, and giving him the privilege of being a public servant and United States citizen.

“Dad, my sitting here today, in the US Capitol talking to our elected officials is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family,” Vindman said in the closing moments of his statement.

“Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.”

Read Vindman’s full opening statement here.

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Javier Zarracina/Vox; NASA

Lunar samples are a time capsule. Scientists say we should go back for more.

In a brilliant white room at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, lies a clear plastic chest filled with bits of the heavens. Inside are meteorites recovered from Antarctic ice and grains of material believed to predate the formation of our solar system. These are treasures, helping us humans understand our place among the stars.

From the chest, geologist Kate Burgess pulls out another treasure: a tiny Teflon vial, double-wrapped in Teflon bags. It contains soil from the moon, collected by the astronauts of Apollo 17 in 1972.

Brian Resnick/Vox

Brian Resnick/Vox

For a very long time, that soil rested undisturbed on the moon, exposed only to the immense radiation of space. When Burgess peers at the specimen with an electron microscope so powerful it can see down to the scale of atoms, she’s looking for evidence of how exposure to that radiation changed the soil color. This sounds like small-bore science. But it’s in service of a grand, even beautiful, idea.

Burgess is working to make moon rocks a reference guide to the greater cosmos. She’s investigating how much of the soil’s color comes from its composition (what it’s made out of) and how much comes from space weathering. She says figuring that out will help identify the composition of objects — like asteroids — spotted by telescopes.

In this way, the lunar samples are a link between us and the heavens, helping us see deeper into them and understand what we find. For planetary scientists, research on lunar samples is invaluable. Unlike Earth, the moon hasn’t changed much since it formed. That makes it a time capsule, a Book of Genesis for the geologically inclined.

In other words: Moon rocks rock.

Scientists are still studying the lunar samples from the Apollo moon landings. But there is now renewed interest in sending humans back to the moon for more.

President Trump wants them to get there by 2024. (We’ll see about that.) And planetary scientists are salivating over the chance to study rocks from the lunar south pole and the side of the moon that never faces Earth. Whether a lunar return is worth the cost, at this point in time, is debatable. But the planetary scientists I spoke with all said, at least, that it would lead to important scientific gains.

That’s because the moon rocks we have tell an incredible story about our place in the universe. The more we can collect, the more we’ll learn.

Why the moon is so darned important for planetary science

The moon landings — the second of which, Apollo 12, happened 50 years ago this week — were about a lot of things: beating the Soviets in the space race, the engineering puzzle of sending humans to the moon’s surface, the challenge for the sake of a challenge. But they were also about geology. Over the course of the six moon landings, astronauts brought back 842 pounds of lunar rocks, pebbles, and soil.

It’s not an exaggeration to say those rocks changed our understanding of our solar system and rewrote its history. “Before Apollo, we really did not know how the moon formed,” says Juliane Gross, a planetary scientist at Rutgers University.

To study geology is to study history. But Earth is constantly erasing its old geologic record.

“The Earth is a gigantic recycling machine,” Gross says. “We have wind, we have rain, we have ice and weather, and so all the rocks weather away.” The crust of our planet is dynamic; our continents float, move, and change. Through the ages, rocks are recycled, remelted, and reformed as continents smash into one another.

The moon, on the other hand, doesn’t erase its history. Aside from asteroid impacts, Gross says, “the moon hasn’t changed much since its formation.” That makes it a time capsule, a ledger for the history of our solar system.

In a moon rock, “you have this tiny treasure trove in your hands,” Gross says. Growing up, she had a dream of becoming an astronaut, which was eventually quashed by her susceptibility to motion sickness. Working with these rocks, she says, “that’s as close as I can get to be[ing] an astronaut.” But instead of exploring space, she and her colleagues are exploring time.

“The [lunar] crust is basically an archive,” Gross says. “And we need to learn how to interpret and how to read that archive.” One of its most important lessons is about how the Earth and moon were formed in the first place.

Moon rocks tell the story of creation

The picture below shows a 4-pound moon rock recovered in 1972 from Apollo 16. It’s mostly made of plagioclase, a rock formed out of molten magma. Rocks like this one make up most of the moon’s crust. And that tells scientists the moon had a very violent beginning.

NASA

Around 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was still in its infancy, it was a much more chaotic place.

Not long before that (cosmically speaking), the sun had burst into being, fusing together hydrogen atoms from an immense ball of gas, setting alight a fire that burns to this day. And that young star was still surrounded by bits of debris clumping together, smashing into one another, forming the planets.

It’s believed that around this time, the Earth (or more like an Earth predecessor) was hit by another planet maybe the size of Mars.

The resulting cataclysm fused the two worlds together, forming our Earth. The power of the collision ejected material from both bodies, and that material melted together to form our moon. The early moon was covered in an ocean of magma, which settled and cooled into the form we know today.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

In this way, the Earth and the moon were a (fraternal) twin birth.

But wait, how do we suspect all this from a boring old white rock?

The answer is kind of simple. Plagioclase is not very dense; it’s the type of mineral you’d expect to arise on the surface of a magma ocean as it cools. When the moon was formed, the plagioclase “actually rose to the surface of the moon and started creating a crust,” says Darby Dyar, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who has been studying lunar samples for decades.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Scientists are still debating the details of this hypothesis. But it seems reasonable because the Earth and moon are made out of similar base materials (suggesting they were created from the same source material) and because that material was molten at the time they formed (due to the great power of the impact).

But that’s just the beginning of the story moon rocks tell.

What moon craters can tell us about the history of the solar system

A huge part of the “archive” of the lunar crust is its craters. And scientists have been able to use the Apollo samples to accurately date those craters.

The moon has changed far less than the Earth, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed at all. Asteroids have hit it over and over again, leading to the pockmarked surface we can see in the night sky. Those craters tell the story of what happened in the solar system after the Earth and the moon were formed.

By age-dating the moon’s craters, we can age-date craters elsewhere. The bigger the craters, the longer ago they were made (because bigger chunks of debris were more common farther back in time). “And now … we have a beautiful impact history of the solar system,” Dyar says. There are craters on other planets, like Mercury, for example. We now know the age of Mercury’s craters “because we have a reference set of information from the moon.”

Learning how old the moon’s craters are then led to another stunning hypothesis: that the outermost planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — have changed their orbits over their lifetimes.

The craters show that around 600 million years after the planets formed, there was a period of heavy bombardment, meaning that the moon got smacked with a lot of asteroids. This was weird. The frantic pace of asteroid collisions ought to have settled down by then.

So what explains the impacts during this time? One possible idea is that if those big gas giant planets moved closer to the sun and then farther away, “they would have disturbed asteroids and they would have flung the asteroids around,” creating the collisions, Gross says.

Scientists still aren’t sure if this is the case. But without moon rocks, they might not have considered the case at all.

Why scientists want more lunar samples

We’ve learned a ton from less than a ton of moon rocks. But these planetary geologists are hungry for more. One reason is that all the Apollo missions landed near the moon’s equator.

Would the scientists like to study samples from other areas? “Oh, hell yeah,” Gross says. “Absolutely.”

“To try to interpret something about the history of the moon from a few hundred kilograms of rocks is very frustrating,” Dyar says, adding that we don’t have any samples from the far side of the moon at all. “We don’t know what other interesting science we’re gonna find.”

The White House is currently pushing NASA to send humans to the moon again by 2024. For now, the plan is for those astronauts to visit the lunar south pole at a crater called the South Pole–Aitken basin — one of the biggest, deepest, and therefore oldest of the moon’s craters. It’s possible the impact that created the basin was so powerful that it exposed the mantle, or interior, of the moon.

Scientists can’t directly study the Earth’s mantle. The moon’s would be the next best thing. “If we can get some of that back, that would be absolutely spectacular,” Gross says. It could help us understand why the Earth has such active geology and the moon does not.

Burgess hopes that if humans get to the moon, they can bring home some samples from areas that have not been exposed to as much space radiation so she can see a more pristine example of an unweathered space rock. Again, that’s in service of understanding what other objects — ones we don’t have pieces of — are made out of.

And that knowledge could have a lot of practical implications. For instance, in the future, if humans want to start mining asteroids for metals and minerals, it will be enormously helpful to know the exact geologic makeup of a particular asteroid before we arrive.

There are a lot of reasons to return humans to the moon and establish a more permanent presence there. The moon would be a good laboratory to teach astronauts how to better survive long, lonely missions in deep space. It would be a good launching ground for missions to Mars, or beyond. And it would potentially be a spot to mine for natural resources.

One of Burgess’s favorite discoveries is bits of helium she found stuck into teeny pits on the lunar sample dirt. The helium “is some of the sun trapped in the moon,” she says. The sun blasts off gases and particles in every direction, and our moon soaked up some of them like a sponge. The finding is as poetic as it is practical: Helium is an increasingly scarce resource on Earth. Perhaps we can learn to harvest it from the moon.

Moon rocks represent what happens when human curiosity is allowed to flourish

To study the moon is to study the Earth and wonder: How special is our world?

“I always think that the most important question for human beings to answer is the issue of, are we alone?” Dyar says. “Is Earth unique?” And in a small way, studying a pile of moon rocks helps us answer that question.

Figuring out how our solar system formed, how our planet formed, helps us understand how rare we are and how special a place this truly is. What if a Mars-sized body never collided with an Earth-sized one? Was that cataclysm somehow necessary for the chain of events that led to life, to you and me, to pizza?

If the moon never existed, Earth would be very different (there wouldn’t be ocean tides, for example). But we would be different too. And we’d possibly be less curious about our place in the universe.

NASA

Without the moon, “I think humanity would have probably never looked up into the sky [and thought], ‘Oh, this object is fairly close, let’s try and get there,’” Gross says. “So we would never have had the curiosity to develop our technology and tools to leave our own planet.”

For so many reasons, the moon is our first stepping stone to the greater reaches of space and the mysteries that lie within. I don’t know if we need to get more moon rocks by the year 2024 specifically. But sometime, someday, we ought to go back.

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Additional reporting by Byrd Pinkerton; graphics by Javier Zarracina/Vox

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President Donald Trump (R) puts his hand on Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s shoulder during his ceremonial swearing in in the East Room of the White House October 08, 2018 in Washington, DC.  | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump v. Mazars is the biggest presidential immunity case since the Nixon administration.

On Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts handed President Trump a small victory in what could be the most important presidential immunity case since the Nixon administration.

Trump v. Mazars USA involves Trump’s effort to escape a House subpoena seeking many of his financial documents. Roberts temporarily halted enforcement of that subpoena to give the Supreme Court more time to consider whether to grant Trump a lengthier stay or lower court decisions saying the subpoena may be enforced. (As the “circuit justice” overseeing cases that arise from a DC federal appeals court, Roberts has the power to issue a brief stay while the Court is considering whether to hand down a much longer one).

Existing law is very bad for Trump in this case. It’s very clear under decades of Supreme Court precedents that the House can enforce this subpoena. So the stakes in Mazars are high. If Trump does prevail before the justices, that decision could inaugurate a new era of presidential immunity from oversight.

Last May, a federal judge held that the House Oversight Committee may enforce a subpoena seeking many of Trump’s financial documents — including, most likely, his tax forms — from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. The committee says it seeks these documents as part of an inquiry into whether stricter financial disclosure laws are needed, although it is likely (as Trump’s lawyers suggest in their brief) that the committee also wants the documents because they will offer a window into corrupt dealings by the president.

Trump has fought hard to convince appeals courts that the House cannot obtain these documents — or, at least, that it cannot obtain them right now — and the subpoena remains unenforced.

That could change soon, however, assuming that the Supreme Court decides to apply the same rules to this subpoena that it applied to politically-charged subpoenas in the past. As the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Nixon (1974), the case that required President Richard Nixon to turn over incriminating tape recordings that ended his presidency, “neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”

But it’s far from clear that this Supreme Court agrees with the ruling in Nixon — or, at least, that this Court’s Republican majority believes that cases like Nixon should be applied to President Trump.

Trump’s latest addition to the Court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, suggested in 1999 that Nixon was “wrongly decided” (though he later praised Nixon during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, saying that he viewed it as a sign of judicial independence). Three lower court judges, all Republicans, also voted in Trump’s favor in various lower court proceedings.

So there’s a real chance that Trump could prevail in the Republican-controlled Supreme Court — and if he does prevail, that could be a legal earthquake. The Supreme Court’s precedents point in one direction: Congress has a broad oversight power, and presidents are not above the law. Mazars could change all of that.

Mazars, moreover, is just one example of Trump seeking extraordinary legal immunity. In a closely related case, Trump v. Vance, where a New York prosecutor seeks Trump’s financial documents, Trump’s lawyer argued that a sitting president is immune from criminal investigation if the president shoots someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. (Trump’s lawyers also asked the Supreme Court to hear the Vance case, but it’s unlikely that the Court will weigh in on that request before it decides whether to grant a stay in Mazars.)

If the Supreme Court buys Trump’s arguments, in other words, Trump could potentially gain the kind of legal immunity more commonly associated with despots than with elected officials. At the very least, decisions in Trump’s favor would signal that the Court is inclined to give Trump far more favorable treatment than it gave to past presidents.

Trump’s legal arguments are exceedingly weak

Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, Congress’s power to conduct oversight and issue subpoenas is quite broad. As the Court explained in Eastland v. United States Servicemen’s Fund (1975), Congress’s investigatory power extends broadly to subpoenas “intended to gather information about a subject on which legislation may be had.”

Both the trial court and the intermediate appeals court ruled that the Mazars subpoena was properly issued under this broad power because the House is considering legislation that would impose stronger financial disclosure requirements on the president, and the records sought by the House Oversight Committee could inform whether such legislation is necessary.

In response, Trump’s lawyers argue that the real purpose of this subpoena isn’t to inform the legislative process at all. It’s to determine whether Trump “broke the law.” Much of their argument echoes a dissenting opinion by Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, who claims that “the Constitution provides only one way for Congress to investigate illegal conduct by the President,” and that’s an impeachment inquiry.

This is the kind of distinction that only the most persnickety lawyer could love. While there was no formal impeachment investigation going on when the Mazars subpoena was initially issued, there is one now. So what’s the point of an argument about whether the House was engaged in a legitimate legislative process if it is free to get these documents as part of an impeachment inquiry?

The most likely answer to this question, however, is delay. If the Supreme Court buys Rao’s argument, that could force the House to reissue the subpoena as part of its impeachment inquiry, and then wait months or even years while the case winds its way through the courts again. By that point, the case could be moot.

Alternatively, Trump’s lawyers also argue that the subpoena is invalid because the “full House” did not vote to specifically give the House Oversight Committee the power to issue this particular subpoena. Again, this is the kind of argument that serves only to delay. If the Supreme Court buys this argument, the House can just hold such a vote — but that could also reset the litigation clock and allow Trump to delay the case into oblivion.

Beyond these two legal arguments, Trump’s lawyers also offer a political argument why the Court should rule in Trump’s favor. The justices should favor Trump in order to fight “the temptation to dig up dirt on political rivals.” Mazars, they claim, is “a case of firsts.” It is the “first time Congress has subpoenaed the personal records of a President that predate his time in office” and “the first time Congress has issued a subpoena, under its legislative powers, to investigate the President for illegal conduct.”

That may very well be true, but it’s far from clear why any of these claims that Mazars is unprecedented should matter legally. The Supreme Court held in Clinton v. Jones (1997) that a sitting president may be sued “based on actions allegedly taken before his term began.” And there was never a serious legal argument that the Senate Watergate hearings were unconstitutional. Mazars is distinct from past presidential investigations in superficial ways, but it is unclear why any of those distinctions have legal significance.

Indeed, to the extent that Mazars is distinguishable from prior investigations into past presidents, those distinctions cut against Trump. As the Court explained in Jones, “We have never suggested that the President, or any other official, has an immunity that extends beyond the scope of any action taken in an official capacity.” The fact that the House seeks records unrelated to Trump’s presidency cuts against Trump.

So current law is very clear that Congress may issue these subpoenas. The open question is whether the current Supreme Court believes that this law should apply to President Trump.

The Supreme Court could hand Trump a big victory without ever ruling on the merits of this case

The immediate question facing the Supreme Court is whether to stay the lower appeals court’s decision against Trump. On Friday, Trump’s lawyers formally sought such a stay from the Supreme Court. Then, on Monday, Chief Justice Roberts temporarily halted enforcement of the subpoena while he and his colleagues consider whether to grant a longer stay. He also ordered the House to respond to Trump’s request for a stay by Thursday afternoon.

That means we will likely find out next week if the Supreme Court will grant a lengthy stay. If the Court does grant it, that would prevent the House Oversight Committee from enforcing its subpoena until after the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case on the merits — and most likely until after the Court hands down a full decision on the merits.

Should the Court decide to hear the case, it’s possible that a decision could come as soon as next June. It’s also possible that the case could be pushed to next term — which would almost certainly delay final resolution of the case until after the election.

Indeed, if the Court grants a stay and then sits on its hands, we may never get a Supreme Court decision telling us if the Mazars subpoena can be enforced. If Trump wins the 2020 election, gerrymandering and Trump’s coattails are likely to sweep Republicans into power in the House — and then House Republicans can simply cancel the subpoena themselves.

Should the Court grant the stay, moreover, the majority is unlikely to publish an opinion explaining why they did so. Stay requests are typically disposed of in brief orders, although those orders sometimes are accompanied by dissenting opinions.

Trump’s request for a stay, in other words, is an example of what University of Chicago law professor William Baude refers to as the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” — a potentially very consequential decision that is decided without opinion, explanation, or any impact on the Court’s prior precedents.

If the Court’s Republican majority wants to rule in favor of Trump, but save itself from the awkward task of explaining why precedents like Nixon shouldn’t control this case, they could potentially hand Trump a quiet, unexplained victory simply by granting the stay and then delaying resolution of the case until the next term.

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