Moments later, I asked Jeffries if he thinks any Republicans will cross the aisle to vote on a sanction vote against Barr, and he smiled and quoted the 18th-century English poet, Alexander Pope—“hope springs eternal.”

But hope hardly sprung eternal in Washington last week as Barr played a role as Donald Trump’s lead defense attorney before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The attorney general, who wears roundish spectacles and talks mostly with his hands, was uneager to answer some of the questions put forth by Democrats on the panel and happy to rattle off defenses of the president to Republicans who usually fed him lines about the Clinton campaign spying on the Trump campaign. At a few points during his remarks, Barr even attacked Robert Mueller, a man he has known for decades, once calling Mueller’s letter to him “snitty.”

On Thursday, the attorney general failed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee. The committee held a mock hearing before an empty room where Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) brought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and ate it in the hearing room. And we discovered that there are few things more gruesome than watching an aging southern lawmaker strip flesh from bone on Capitol Hill. He later told MSNBC, “the message is Bill Barr is a chicken.”

In a conversation with Playboy a few hours later, Congressman David Cicilline (D-R.I)—who also sits on the House Judiciary Committee—didn’t seem overly worried that the attorney general was absent from a hearing before his panel. Cicilline told me “from my perspective, the production of the unredacted [Mueller] report is much more significant. I don’t think that Mr. Barr has a lot to share in terms of what happened in the 2016 presidential campaign. He has a lot of questions to answer about why he so mislead the American people.” Moments later, he confirmed that discussions are underway with Robert Mueller and House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler to get Mueller to appear before the committee—the tentative date for that hearing is May 15.

But we live in a partisan era and even Mueller—who lead the FBI under Bush and Obama—isn’t above the partisanship of Trump. The president has raged against the special counsel on Twitter, but when asked if he expects Republicans will go after Mueller on partisan grounds, Rep. Cicilline told Playboy, “good luck with that. I think it would be very difficult for the Republicans on the committee to attack the credibility and integrity of Mr. Mueller who they all celebrated when he was appointed as a person of impeccable integrity,” he added, “I think that’s a hard thing for them to do. They might do it, but I don’t think it would work.”

The aisle that cuts down the middle of the political stages on Capitol Hill, and more often than ever, in American life, cut deeper last week. And the attorney general is one of the figures who dragged his axe through that chasm. He offered a four-page summary and a press conference on the findings of the Mueller report so supportive of Trump that Mueller sent a letter to Barr complaining about the reception of his two-year-long investigation. That tension allowed lawmakers, and Americans, to draw their own conclusions.

A club of senators who double as 2020 candidates called for Barr to resign, among them Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. They stamped those messages into fundraising emails—Gillibrand wrote to supporters “Barr has undermined that trust by misrepresenting the Mueller report and by giving misleading testimony to Congress.” Harris, who had a tense back-and-forth with Barr, sent out an email declaring that Barr “made something very clear today: he must resign.” In the next line, she pivoted flawlessly, calling to action: “I’m running for president because the American people deserve truth and integrity from their elected leaders. That’s not what we’re getting right now.” In a fundraising email titled “Stand with Barr,” Trump wrote to his supporters “patriotic Americans can’t sit by and watch Democrats attack Attorney General Barr for doing his job.”

It was a week in which everybody felt wronged by something.

Because of the machinery of Washington, any decent politics addict can crystal-ball the next steps, but there are too many splits in too many roads to put solid bets on the next few weeks. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Nadler has already threatened to hold Barr in contempt of Congress. In a conversation with Playboy on Thursday, Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who also sits on that committee, said “I would not be surprised if next week we go to a contempt proceeding in the House Judiciary Committee.” The Judiciary Committee has since announced that they will hold the vote on Wednesday, Lieu told me that he has “absolute confidence” that proceeding will pass in the House, adding, “the only question is are there going to be Republicans who put country over party and vote with the Democrats because they understand that you cannot have a Congress that is neutered.”

And, in an extreme scenario, that could mean the arrest of the attorney general. Cicilline told reporters on Wednesday, “it doesn’t have to go to the courts … there is ample evidence that Congress has the authority to find someone in contempt for the disregard of a lawfully issued subpoena and to take that individual into custody.”

When asked if he thinks Barr would have told the truth to the House Judiciary Committee, Lieu said “I think he would have told the truth when it serves him.” He mentioned that this is one of the first times that Trump’s White House is openly shunning subpoenas from Congress, which brands a new era. The president has always believed that he can rule rather than lead, but the open disregard for another branch of the government is another hand even for Trump. This is perhaps the first time that he has acted on his belief that our nation’s separation of powers operates on the idea that his power is supreme to those others.

At the beginning of Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Lindsey Graham boomed about the Mueller report, “it is over.”

But it is not over. Nothing in Washington is ever over until there have been so many hearings and traded insults and legal motions that the public finally gives up on our elected leaders as children fighting over trucks in the sandbox. Then, at some point, these lawmakers realize that their battles have stopped awarding them points in the polls, and they turn to another battle to wage. One with new villains or old villains reinvented. Think Hillary Clinton with a new email address or Donald Trump hiding a new foreign real estate project. And the public is still very much interested in the Mueller probe.