Requiem for an Impeachment

Well, it’s over.

On February 6, 2020, the Senate acquitted Donald Trump on two articles of impeachment, bringing an end to a process the president has been hurtling toward since the moment of his inauguration. The case against him turned on the specifics of his efforts to pressure Ukraine to provide negative information on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. But in another sense, this impeachment had been inevitable since Trump swore the oath of office. He and the Constitution are irrevocably at odds; one way or another, the country was always going to end up here.

But “here” doesn’t just mean a world in which Trump has been impeached, of course; it’s also a world in which a majority of the Senate voted to bless his conduct. “Here,” then, is somewhere after the end of the story. The project now for safeguarding democracy in America is to figure out how