Impeached! Now What?

Last night, the House of Representatives voted along party lines to impeach Donald Trump on two counts:  abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.  But after the votes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters she would delay transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate, where Republican leaders have already said they would quickly dismiss the charges.  So who knows what will happen next.

Nevertheless, as numerous commentators have already observed, the House vote means Trump's name will forever be branded with an asterisk in the history books as the third president to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

For the record, here are some videos concerning the impeachment vote as well as the raging, decidedly unpresidential letter Trump sent Pelosi on Tuesday, accusing Democrats of "declaring open war on American Democracy" by "an illegal, partisan attempted coup" that is a "colossal injustice."




The historical significance of this impeachment:




Former presidential advisers John Dean and David Axelrod on the impreachment:




Republican lawmakers compare impeachment of Trump to Jesus and Pearl Harbor:




CNN's Anderson Cooper on what the Trump letter didn't mention:




Also worth reading:  Paul Bergala's comments on the Trump letter.  Excerpt:

Trump's letter to Pelosi has been described in clinical terms. It has been called "deranged" or just plain "sick." But while I appreciate the need to understand Trump, I do not believe that understanding will be found in psychology. . . .

But most important, excusing Trump as merely ill lets him off the hook too easily. So, rather than leaning on psychiatry, I think we ought to dig deeper for a more meaningful, powerful, and accurate nomenclature. His letter is not sick; it is evil. His conduct is not deranged; it's tyrannical. I hope every member of Congress reads it.

In my multiple readings, one sentence, however, struck me more than the others. Perhaps because it's one of the few that I think is 100 percent honest: "I write this letter to you," Mr. Trump says in the penultimate paragraph, "for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record." This is Trump speaking to history. This is his manifesto.

And his manifesto, of course, is shot through with lies, mendacity being Trump's native tongue. Like many people, Trump lies when it suits his purpose, but his assault on the truth, particularly in this letter, is essential to his mode of governing. Killing truth is not merely a means to an end for Trump; it is a vital end in itself. . . .

The letter is Trump's governing philosophy distilled. He is a wannabe autocrat, who has made his goal clear: to remake America as he has remade the Republican Party -- turning a once-proud, strong party into a gaggle of sycophantic lickspittles. His rage for Speaker Pelosi is boundless because she stands up to him. His letter is a window not into a troubled psyche, but something much worse.

And whether Trump is removed from office or not, his impeachment matters profoundly, says constitutional law professor Frank O. Bowman. Excerpt:

Whatever the short-term consequences, this impeachment is the right thing to do.

It is right, first, because the truth matters. The United States is an inheritor of the Enlightenment conviction that the world is comprehensible, reality is discoverable and social arrangements should be built on clear-eyed assessments of fact. American democracy depends on a special elaboration of the Enlightenment ideal, which insists that truth is not the private property of priesthoods or aristocracies, but is the public province of every citizen, the necessary predicate to informed communal choice.

Our president is a liar. He sits at the center of a web of falsehood, constantly spinning grotesque new entanglements, constantly abetted by his hired sycophants and, more consequentially, by a dark element of the media which finds in Trump the perfect champion of its own impulse to transform the press from arbiter of truth to purveyor of profitable propaganda. Trump’s dishonesty is so integral to his personality and to all his works that to support him requires that one become a liar oneself, or at least to become willfully indifferent to mendacity.

The House impeachment process was essential to the cause of recovering truth as a public value. Without it, Trump’s misconduct in relation to Ukraine would have remained a mere scandalous rumor, blithely denied by Trump and generally ignored by the public. More fundamentally, the hearings in the House Intelligence Committee recaptured, for a blessed moment at least, the world we are in danger of losing: a world in which it is natural for honest public servants to serve their country impartially and speak the truth when they witness a betrayal of its values. This impeachment calls us to renew our mutual obligation of public candor. . . .

Finally, the value of any public act cannot necessarily be measured in its immediate success of failure. By voting to impeach Donald Trump, Democrats express their faith in, to adapt a phrase from Charles de Gaulle, a certain idea of America. An America that is commonly truthful, unusually generous, customarily trustworthy, instinctively democratic, committed to human freedoms and individual rights, self-protective without being selfish, always imperfect but perennially challenging itself to do better. An America that, to borrow a favorite image from a man Republicans used to revere, at least aspired to be the world’s shining city on a hill.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that our republic is in peril. In impeaching Trump for his betrayal of American values, we reassert to each other our commitment to a resurgent democracy. And we speak not just to each other but to a watching world. We demonstrate that, although for the moment America is in the grip of madness, there remains a sturdy contingent of Americans willing to fight for the hopeful America upon which so many of the world's highest aspirations depend.