What Impeachment Is Revealing About the Republican Party

The House Intelligence Committee brought impeachment onto the public stage over the past two weeks. But now Congress has scattered for Thanksgiving, cable news is picking over the remnants of the hearings in search of content, the president is fuming, and impeachment has moved into a murky new phase, the parameters of which are not entirely clear.

So what happens next?

The public hearings lurched from physical comedy to riveting seriousness to bleak warnings about the corrosive effects of conspiracy theories on American democracy. The hearings provided new information—including the extent to which the Ukrainian government suspected a possible extortion attempt by the United States early on in President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign, along with the phone call between Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in which Trump personally asked whether he was going to get his “investigations.”

But the public proceedings largely dramatized the story that we already knew about Trump’s coercive efforts with respect to Ukraine. Witness after witness made it obvious: The president was attempting to force Ukraine to announce sham investigations that would benefit Trump politically, in exchange for a White House visit and hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid. There were a lot of witnesses. They were credible. And they were, individually