What would have Happened if Nixon Hadn't Resigned?

Marcy Wheeler has labeled it "Brook Brothers Riot 2.0." (The first iteration of the Brooks Brothers Riot was when Republican staffers interrupted the 2000 presidential vote recount in Miami-Dade County.) According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos (see "Republicans Grind Impeachment Inquiry to Halt as Evidence Mounts Against Trump"):

Chanting “Let us in! Let us in!” about two dozen Republican members of the House pushed past Capitol Police officers to enter the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee, where impeachment investigators have been conducting private interviews that have painted a damaging picture of the president’s behavior. 

The government official being interviewed was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, Laura Cooper, who was providing the "smoking gun" in the form of testimony regarding Trump's hold on the hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance for the U.S. banana republic on the Dnieper.

It's going to be hard, following the Taylor testimony, for the GOP to deny that Trump was involved in an illegal shakedown of the government of incoming Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. So they're resorting to circus theater, the next installment of which is going to feature a call to reveal the whistle-blower's identity, as if that matters at this point. Stolberg and Fandos note that

Indeed, some Republicans are growing increasingly uneasy about the inquiry, and fretting that it could get much, much worse for them. Publicly, they are taking their cues from the president, and Wednesday’s performance appeared intended to please Mr. Trump. The president has fumed publicly and privately that Republicans have not been tough enough in defending him, and has recently tried to undercut the inquiry by suggesting that the whistle-blower whose allegations touched it off is not credible or does not exist.

“Where’s the Whistleblower?” the president tweeted on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the senior Republicans on the three investigative panels involved in the inquiry formally requested that Mr. Schiff arrange for public testimony by the whistle-blower, and all government officials the whistle-blower relied on to compile that account.

The Republicans will continue to spotlight MacGuffins as the impeachment inquiry rolls along. In a way it is a spectacular moment. We are living through counterfactual history. What would have happened if Nixon hadn't resigned in August 1974?

Nixon's resignation is a important moment in time because it kicked off the gestation period for our current zombie neoliberal paradigm.

So we're back to the future. It rarely happens in such a focused way.