"Constitutional decay" in the US Senate

This week, Chief Justice John Roberts was sworn in to preside over the third presidential impeachment trial in US history. What happens next? What’s Mitch McConnell’s game plan? And who the hell is Lev Parnas? Andrew Prokop breaks it all down.  Then, a Senate impeachment trial is one of the rarest and least understood events in American politics. Constitutional expert Jeffrey Tulis explains how the trial works, what the founders envisioned when they designed it, and why things should look very, very different from the Senate per usual.  And, at the end, the new evidence released by Lev Parnas was damning, but, then again, all of the evidence so far has been incredibly damning. The problem we face in this impeachment trial is not that we lack damning testimony, it’s that we lack Republican senators who are willing to put country over party. Host: Ezra Klein (@ezraklein), Editor-at-large, Vox Guests:  Andrew Prokop (@awprokop), Senior politics correspondent, Vox  Jeffrey Tulis, Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin Want to contact the show? Reach out at [e-mail] Ezra's book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com. You can subscribe to Ezra's other podcast The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts Credits: Producer, Engineer, Editor - Jeff Geld Researcher - Roge Karma EP - Liz Nelson Theme music composed by Jon Natchez  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices