The moment of truth for Democrats arrives Wednesday

A crucial phase of the impeachment investigation begins with public hearings Wednesday. House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee are preparing to review with the public some of the damning findings that they have gathered over the course of their closed hearings with committee Republicans.

Chairman Adam Schiff will now attempt to open up the conversation so that Americans can see and hear the main witnesses themselves and learn just how far members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle were willing to go in withholding foreign assistance and diplomatic meetings from Ukraine in pursuit of help for Trump’s reelection campaign.

Will Democrats be able to accomplish their goal? After watching the circus that unfolded in other recent hearings, such as when Sen. Lindsey Graham went on a blistering partisan tirade against Democrats as Brett Kavanaugh faced accusations of sexual harassment or when Corey Lewandowski filibustered House Judiciary hearings, Democrats should understand that House Republicans won’t make things easy.

The fact that Republicans just placed Ohio congressman Jim Jordan — one of the President’s top attack dogs — on the committee offers a signal to what we might expect from the minority party. House Republicans have also requested that Hunter Biden and the whistleblower testify.

In other words, Republicans will do everything in their power to discredit the entire process from the moment that the hearings begin. They will do their best to speech-ify about how Democrats are trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election and they will complain that the process has been unfair.

Each witness who has something damaging to say about President Trump will come under fire, with Republicans accusing them of political bias or lying. The Republican defenders of Trump won’t allow witnesses much time to speak and will attempt to bait Democrats into fights rather than focusing on the case itself. Whenever there is a chance, they will use the hearings to stoke doubts and spread dirt about Joe Biden.

Democrats will need an effective strategy to counteract these tactics. Republicans might be throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, but it will be easy for the press and the public to get caught up in the food fight rather than the smoking guns which have been produced in closed hearings at a dizzying pace.

The biggest challenge for Democrats will be to curtail their own commentary in order to allow the witnesses to speak. The most important information in congressional hearings usually comes from the people who saw the misuse of power rather than from legislators who want to tell constituents what they think about the whole matter.

When we look back to the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, we remember what figures like John Dean or Alexander Butterfield had to say more than any of the committee members, even Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin. It seems that Democrats will be relying on staff counsel to ask many of the questions, a smart decision and one they should stick to as the tumult unfolds.

Nor can Democrats spend too much time responding to the Republican vitriol. Hearings are a time game and it is easy to lose control of the process. The best path for Democrats will be to figure out how to preserve the time they have for the public to hear about the details of the scandal as opposed to the process-based fights which are sure to come.

With the time that they do use for themselves, Democrats need to frame the conversation around the important question of how this politicization of foreign policy compares to what we have seen in the past.

This is a fundamental question — one that will loom large on the minds of voters who are trying to figure out whether what happened is impeachable or not. The scandal is not simply about Ukraine but about the presidential abuse of power.

Democrats need to guide voters toward an understanding of whether this conduct did cross a threshold that requires articles of impeachment. While many Democrats might already have reached this conclusion, the point of the hearings is for Democrats to make the case to everyone else that this decision is warranted before they vote.

Outside of the hearings, Democrats will have even more work to do. They will have to push back against the ongoing flow of disinformation and smears that the country will see as the GOP does everything possible to render the hearings politically irrelevant and even damaging to the case.

While Democrats would make a mistake to use the hearings to make speeches of their own, they will need to take to the airwaves in the other hours to make sure that the debate is conducted around real facts and real evidence rather than spurious claims. This will obviously be extremely difficult given the bully pulpit of Fox News, but it will be a major part of their challenge.

From the start, skeptics of impeachment have warned that it is virtually impossible to hold constructive hearings in this day and age. They might be right. However, given the enormous amount of damaging evidence that has emerged about how the administration handled foreign policy, the consequences of open testimony could be significant. So far, there has not been a backlash against the Democrats, as some predicted, nor has the President had a very easy time controlling the narrative.

Now come the hearings, and the burden will fall on Schiff and his colleagues to use their legislative platform in a way that their colleagues on the Judiciary Committee have been unable to do.