Senator Mitch McConnell released his long awaited rules for a Senate impeachment trial for President Trump and they stood out for their very un–Adam Schiff–like respect for both sides of the aisle.

Axios summarizes the terms this way:

Details: Under the resolution, House Democratic managers and Trump's defense team will each be given up to 24 hours over two days to present their cases.

• Senators will then have 16 hours to submit their questions to Chief Justice John Roberts.
• After the Q&A period, the Senate will vote on whether to consider and debate witness subpoenas.
• If the Senate votes no, no one will be permitted to call for new witnesses or documents, according to a Republican leadership aide.
• If the Senate votes yes, both sides will have an opportunity to motion to subpoena witnesses, then senators will debate and vote on them.
• Then the Senate will vote on whether to convict the president and remove him from office.

Hear that, Dems?  You all can pick whether you want witnesses to testify, any witnesses you like, but if you do, you'll have to let the Republican majority do the same.  Even-steven.  That's a dilemma.

Cocaine Mitch has decided that the best way to stick the shiv into the Democrats is to play fair.

No wonder it's got Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer bawling.

Compare and contrast Mitch's move with Adam Schiff's House secret basement hearings, where only Democrats were allowed to call witnesses, and after all the cherrypicking and leaks were done, witnesses were supposedly permitted by both sides at the public hearing...but only if Schiff approved them.  And after all that rigging, the only thing they could cook up was a paltry two articles of impeachment, both on spurious grounds, both the thinnest of subjective gruel, such as Trump resisting Schiff's efforts to frame Trump, otherwise known as "obstruction of Congress," and one other Alice-in-Wonderland charge.  They want More.  They're hungry.

Well, they've got what they want.  

For Dems, that means they can subpoena John Bolton, who must have no great love for Trump but isn't interested in being the Dems' pawn, either, and has said he won't testify without a subpoena.  McConnell's move puts that tantalizing goodie within Democrat reach now.  For Democrats, Bolton is the magic bullet, the Gollum's ring, the unreachable key, the man who will finally open the door to Getting Trump.  The slavering is loud on making him a witness.

They pant.  They pine.  They're convinced that Bolton knows the untold truth of some kind of impeachable offense, something they themselves have in short supply since the rigged basement hearings and that weird thing with the bullet-shaped swag pens and the religious-like ceremonial walk to the Senate chambers, Nancy Pelosi giggling and sounding sloshed in pink. 

Bolton will fix it all for them.

The catch, though, is that it comes at a price too high for them to pay.  They can have all the Bolton they like, but Republicans will be allowed to issue equal subpoenas to all the people Adam Schiff nixed earlier — Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Eric Ciaramella, Schiff himself, John Brennan, James Comey, Alexandra Chalupa, a host of Ukrainian officials, maybe even the Ukrainian prime minister who says Trump did nothing wrong...all the people they wanted to call earlier.

If Democrats are hungry for Bolton, Republicans are even hungrier for all these witnesses they couldn't call the first time around.

The GOP witness wish list could only expose the whole Democrat-plotted rigging operation.  It could expose the foundations of the whole slimy planned scam against Trump from the get-go.  Sure, the Democrats could get their Magic Bolton.  But then they'll have to choose between him and all the witnesses they don't want to see on the stand. 

It goes to show that Cocaine Mitch knows how to deal, and he's opted for the cleverest of solutions: giving the Democrats exactly what they want...good and hard.