Dec 21, 2019
The House vote to impeach the president accomplishes almost nothing. The vote was entirely partisan (except for the Democrats who voted not guilty to appeal to the Republicans in their district, in an inspiring display of bipartisan cowardice), so no one’s mind has been changed. Impeachment in the House is symbolic, and though it will, I suppose, be “a stain on this presidency,” it won’t be any more of a stain than, you know, the dude in the office and all of the things he’s said and done. And the Republican-controlled senate, barring some act of God or copious amounts of mind-altering drugs, will never vote to remove him from office, not even if you make them pinky-swear (seriously, this whole “we’ll send the articles when we see that the trial will be fair” thing is just—I really hope there’s some actual political strategy to this that I’m not seeing, because on the face of it it seems incredibly stupid).
But I said it accomplishes almost nothing, so let’s talk about the almost. America’s democratic institutions have been largely failing of late, from hyper-partisan politics to the Electoral College still being a thing, to the Supreme Court being unconstitutionally loaded with conservative judges just waiting to reverse decades of progress, to all of the Nazis running around doing Nazi things. So here’s what we’ve got: a president who definitely did some high crimes and misdemeanors, and an institutional mechanism for addressing that. And hey, they’re doing the thing. It won’t accomplish anything, and it might even make things worse. But the process is happening, even if all the people involved in it are inept and/or corrupt, and if that gives people enough hope to make them vote then maybe we can turn this ship around, or at least slow it down so that we don’t hit the iceberg reefs trash island quite as hard.
Basically, impeachment is a desperate puff upon the dying embers of American democracy, and what really sucks is that that’s the best we can hope for.
Certain of Eventual Failure 