As headlines and news hosts proclaim the historic weight of Wednesday’s impeachment of an American president, there’s a barely spoken murmur of malaise that few are willing to state out loud: it just doesn’t feel that historic. For conservatives, it’s a barely registered bump on the road to either Trump’s re-election or some version of a Second Civil War. For liberals and progressives, Trump’s impeachment provides less an exclamation of justice than a notice of strategic defiance. This act may ultimately be designed less for immediate accountability than to ensure the opposition party acted appropriately to this lawless president in the eyes of history.
This is not the Democrats’ fault. Impeachment feels less historic than it should because the Republican Party has utterly abandoned its sense of shame and responsibility to the country. The unprecedented event Wednesday was less about the impeachment itself than the Republican Party’s unanimous refusal to hold to account a corrupt tyrant clearly unfit for office. If it feels like our democracy is slowly spiraling out of control, that’s because it’s true.
First, the obvious: President Trump is so clearly guilty of attempting to bribe and extort Ukraine that it hardly requires repeating here. His own doctored transcript states the case bluntly even as he declares it “perfect”; multiple witnesses that he appointed corroborated his guilt during Congressional testimony; and Trump’s own Chief of Staff openly admitted as much in a public press hearing—he likely thought it was so obvious that it was better to brazenly deny that Trump’s behavior was a problem than to attempt to deny it happened at all. Continue reading