GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz yells at the impeachment witnesses for mentioning Barron Trump

Rep. Matt Gaetz's (R-Fla.) five minutes of questioning are apparently for him to talk and for witnesses to listen.

On Wednesday, legal experts gathered before the House Judiciary Committee for an impeachment hearing, during which Gaetz didn't do much hearing at all. Instead, he used most of his questioning opportunity to bring up the witnesses' apparent liberal bias, and then devolved into a one-sided shouting match once they started to answer his question.

Gaetz first tried to trap Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman into adhering to an anti-impeachment article he wrote before President Trump's infamous phone call with Ukraine's president. "Until this call on July 25, I was an impeachment skeptic," Feldman snuck in before Gaetz pivoted to Stanford University Professor Pamela Karlan. Gaetz questioned Karlan on her donations to past Democratic candidates, and then accused her of having "contempt" for conservatives because on a podcast, she'd said "conservatives ... tend to spread out more, perhaps because they don't even want to be around themselves."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But before she could clarify that statement, Gaetz unloaded on Karlan. "You may not see this from the ivory towers of your law school, but it makes actual people in this country..." Gaetz said before Karlan tried to respond. "Excuse me, you don't get to interrupt me on this time," Gaetz said over her, and brought up an earlier play on words Karlan made regarding Trump's 13-year-old son Barron. "When you invoke the president's son's name here ... that does not lend credibility to your argument. It makes you look mean," Gaetz went on. Watch the whole exchange below. Kathryn Krawczyk