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Never has history felt less consequential.
The impending impeachment of President Donald Trump is, as news accounts and blaring newspaper headlines tell us, historic. This is true by definition since a president has been impeached only twice before in 230 years.
But everyone knows this history isn't going to matter much. In fact, the day after the Senate trial ends in inevitable acquittal, everything goes on exactly the same as before (except for vulnerable House Democrats from Trump districts, who will have to defend their votes until November).
Impeachment won't occasion any significant new jurisprudence on executive privilege or the line between executive or legislative prerogatives.
It hasn't produced any particularly memorable TV. The witnesses before Adam Schiff's Intelligence Committee were damaging, but not nearly as compelling or perhaps as explosive as any of the true insiders that it would have taken time and litigation to try to get, like Mick Mulvaney or Rudy Giuliani. By the last round of witnesses before the Judiciary Committee, staff lawyers were testifying and questioning one another, in a strange and pointless exercise.
It hasn't gripped the nation. No one is going to say years from now, "I remember where I was when Donald Trump hate-tweeted Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch."
It hasn't generated any momentum in public opinion since the Ukraine story first broke, instead settling into an evenly split stalemate that is characteristic of the partisanship of our era.
Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump's conduct in the Ukraine affair, which is indeed indefensible, yet the focus on Ukraine still seems pretextual. Many Democrats have long wanted to impeach him and latched onto Ukraine because it offered the possibility of a quick and easy investigation and vote. It is not an unexpected turn in our politics, rather the inexorable working-out of the hostile reaction to Trump beginning immediately after his election.
All of this drains impeachment, the most consequential recourse that Congress has against a president, of what should be its inherent drama.
It is telling that even Democratic presidential candidates aren't particularly invested in impeachment. They pay it lip service but don't talk about it much on the campaign trail, even though they are all, to a man and a woman, excoriating about Trump.
Nancy Pelosi, too, knows the score, which is why she unveiled articles of impeachment nearly simultaneously with the announcement of a deal to pass the successor to NAFTA, the USMCA. These two acts are, to put it mildly, in tension.
On one hand, House Democrats are saying that Trump is such a threat to the integrity of the 2020 election that he has to be impeached urgently — so urgently that it's too risky to pause and try to gather evidence from firsthand witnesses or resolve basic matters of fact.
On the other hand, House Democrats are giving Trump a legislative achievement that, at the margins, will help him win the very election they want him to be disqualified from.
Yes, the net effect of Pelosi's actions on Tuesday was to do less to ensure the removal of Trump than to assist him in winning four more years to supposedly endanger our system of government and national security.
The odd impeachment-USCMA combination makes impeachment look, in part, like an exercise in coalition management. By impeaching Trump, Pelosi is giving her base what it always wanted; she's making it up to her moderates by giving them the bipartisan accomplishments that they've always wanted. As an exercise in practical politics, this is understandable, but the approach doesn't jibe with the apocalyptic rhetoric about Trump deployed to justify his impeachment.
Ultimately, impeachment is going to get swallowed up by the news cycle like everything else. It will leave a mark, becoming a line high up in Wikipedia and any other capsule account of the Trump presidency going forward. In short order after the end of the Senate trial, though, it will seem like an event from a distant epoch. A new outrage will emerge, dominating news coverage for a few days, to be replaced by another, in the well-established pattern of the Trump era.
How historic is an event, really, if a month afterward the course of American politics is completely unchanged?
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