At 9 a.m. ET, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanocitch will appear in front of the House Intelligence Committee for the second open impeachment hearing.

Playbook: “Democrats need to keep the line moving, as they say in baseball. New revelations, new details, new color. Networks are still planning to take this live — and the cables all will, too — so the lights are still bright. Republicans, to put it bluntly, can’t look like they’re whacking a career Foreign Service officer — who happens to be female. Republicans have one woman on Intel. So they tell us they have to be exceedingly careful to not look as if they are ganging up on her.”

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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) condemned the “moral degeneration” of Republicans in a CBS News interview in his assessment of their conduct during the impeachment inquiry of President Trump.

Said Raskin: “One of the critical components of this story is the absolute moral degeneration of the Republican Party. They’re behaving like members of a religious cult.”

“A longtime career employee at the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to break ranks and testify Saturday in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, potentially filling in important details on the hold-up of military aid to Ukraine,” the Washington Post reports.

“Mark Sandy would be the first OMB employee to testify in the inquiry, after OMB acting director Russell T. Vought and two other political appointees at the agency defied congressional subpoenas to appear. The White House has called the impeachment inquiry unconstitutional and ordered administration officials not to participate.”

“House Democrats are publicly holding out hope that historic impeachment hearings will persuade a vast majority of the American public that President Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors — but privately many acknowledge that it’s unlikely to happen,” CNN reports.

“In a private meeting this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants were skeptical about the prospects of a dramatic shift in opinion even as public impeachment hearings began this week, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The upshot, the sources said: Democrats need to move forward with impeachment proceedings even if the politics are murky, noting that even during Richard Nixon’s presidency most of the public was divided until soon before he was forced to resign.”