Five key takeaways from Wednesday's impeachment proceedings

The second full day of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the US Senate has concluded. Here are five key takeaways:

Managers open their case

With the initial procedural hurdles cleared, the impeachment managers began to lay out the case against Trump. The lead manager, Adam Schiff, offered an overview of Trump’s scheme to extract personal political favors from Ukraine, beginning with the exploits of Rudy Giuliani and running through to the suspension of military aid to the country.

Schiff urged the senators to gather information in the case that Trump had so far blocked. “You will hear from witnesses who have not yet testified,” Schiff said. “That is, if you allow it. If we have a fair trial.”

The managers used up the first eight of their allotted 24 hours on Wednesday and are expected to continue to unfold their argument on Thursday and Friday. Trump’s lawyers will have time to respond starting Saturday.

Schiff asks Republicans to consider the stakes

In trying to break the partisan lockstep that has defined the impeachment process so far, Schiff urged Republicans to consider the stakes and to let fall, if possible, for a brief moment, their instinct to protect the president.

Schiff warned that allowing Trump to defy congressional subpoenas for witnesses and testimony would forever tip the balance of power perilously away from the legislature and toward the presidency.

“If we don’t stand up to this peril today, we will write the history of our decline with our own hand,” Schiff said.

Related: Case for impeachment fails to disturb McConnell's sweet dreams of acquittal

Restive Republicans

Visibly frustrated at the long hours of the trial, Republicans – and some Democrats – appeared at times to be on the verge of mild mutiny, openly flouting rules requiring them to remain at their desks and instead circulating in a cloakroom off the Senate flour.

There was no indication that Schiff’s description of impressive stakes did anything to impress Republicans listening. The night before, in the first full day of the trial, not a single Republican joined Democrats to require the testimony of four witnesses with direct knowledge of the case.

“I didn’t hear anything new today,” said the Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, with no apparent irony.

Senator Ted Cruz said the proceedings had somehow made the testimony of Hunter Biden, the former vice-president’s son, “all the more relevant”.

So the partisan firewall has not yet crumbled.

Evidence and more evidence

“The evidence of wrongdoing by president Trump is hiding in plain sight,” said Hakeem Jeffries, one of the impeachment managers. Another manager, Jason Crow, pointed out that just the night before, new relevant emails from the Office of Management and Budget had been released capturing conversations about the suspended military aid to Ukraine.

“If the president’s lawyers contest any of the facts I’m talking about, you should demand to see the full record,” Crow said.

To tell their story, Democrats aired dozens of video clips from previous public testimony in the case. The clips made for something of a greatest hits reel: the ambassador Gordon Sondland asking “was there a quid pro quo?” and saying “the answer is yes”; the diplomat David Holmes quoting Sondland saying Trump “doesn’t give an expletive about Ukraine”; the former national security official Fiona Hill saying Sondland “was being involved in a domestic political errand and we were being involved in national security policy, and those two things had diverged”; the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, saying at a news conference that politics was baked into Trump administration foreign policy and the country should “get over it”.

No visible shift in battle lines

One of the main points of contention going into the Senate trial – whether a small number of Republicans would call for witnesses and documents – had not changed: no Republican had revealed an intention to do so. Trump appeared to be skating toward acquittal, and the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and Trump’s legal team were scrambling to wrap up the trial as quickly as possible.

At this rate, it seemed, Trump could get his wish of acquittal before his State of the Union address on 4 February.