The system worked; the guardrails held. Except they almost didn’t. But thanks to a cadre of white Republican men, we still live in a free country.

Ultimately, that was the message of the first three days of the House January 6 committee hearings, whether intended or not.

I know: This was a calculated and likely wise decision to focus not at all on Trump’s Democratic critics but to rely on former Trump Republicans. And I am vastly underselling these hearings, on one level. We got photos, videos, and devastating first-person testimony we hadn’t before. Clearly, the guardrails almost came off. The first-day testimony of Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards—“I was slipping in people’s blood”—will stay with me forever. Twice-impeached former President Donald Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” in the words of committee vice-chair Republican Liz Cheney. “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” archconservative lawyer J. Michael Luttig told the committee in the third hearing.

In the end, though, these early hearings left us with a tedious yet shocking reality: For at least two months, the “good” Trump staffers—lawyers and others in the inner circle, the so-called “Team Normal”—spent all their time fighting crazy, implausible theories about nonexistent voter fraud, and nonexistent (at least legally) ways to overturn the Electoral...

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