Impeachment battle pits facts against partisanship

The contrast between Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state, told us everything we needed to know about the impeachment hearings into President Trump that began on Wednesday.

Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, wanted to make everything about party. Kent, a lifelong civil servant, wanted to make everything about country.

Noting that he was “the third generation of my family to have chosen a career in public service,” Kent declared: “It was unexpected, and most unfortunate, to watch some Americans — including those who allied themselves with corrupt Ukrainians in pursuit of private agendas — launch attacks on dedicated public servants advancing U.S. interests in Ukraine. In my opinion, those attacks undermined U.S. and Ukrainian national interests and damaged our critical bilateral relationship.”

Take that, Mr. Nunes (and Rudy Giuliani).

And several Republicans furnished further proof that they are far more interested in discrediting the hearings than in establishing the truth. GOP members briefly delayed the proceedings to demand yet again that the whistleblower who let the world know about Trump’s efforts to push the Ukrainian government to smear Joe Biden be called to testify. Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., whose own opening statement was largely a recitation of known facts, shut them down.

Thus were the terms of the coming struggle established. Democrats hope that piling up evidence offered almost entirely by people with no political axes to grind will shift public opinion against Trump. Republicans hope to obscure the facts by arguing that anything critical of Trump must have a partisan motive.

Insisting integrity will eventually win, Trump’s critics point to the Watergate hearings in 1973 and 1974 as turning the tide against Richard Nixon.

Well, yes. But we were a far more open-minded and less partisan country back then. There were many more moderate and liberal Republicans as well as more openness to the other side’s views — and no Fox News and no rightwing talk radio empire.

Gallup contrasted its surveys on removing Trump from office with comparable polls about Nixon in August 1974. Gallup found that while 92% of Republicans last month rejected removing Trump, only 59% felt that way about Nixon.

Other polls have found somewhat more Republican support for driving Trump from office, and it’s also true that by August 1974, the country had gone through more than a year of highly public Watergate inquiries.

Nonetheless, no one can deny how partisan polarization has deepened since Nixon. And Democrats are operating in an information environment that is not conducive to sober reflection.

Political scientists Jennifer Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein posed the key question in their 2015 book, “Do Facts Matter?” As they wrote in The Washington Post, to persuade a “misinformed voter ... to reject false knowledge, change policy views, disagree with friends, agree with former enemies, and perhaps abandon leaders or even a political party, requires an enormous amount of effort and resources.”

Trump — with help from Nunes and his colleagues — seems to be counting on exactly that.