Trump’s call with Tuberville to advance his own personal political interests had to be cut short—so Tuberville could be evacuated from the Senate chamber in order to protect his life and the lives of other senators.

The Black Lives Matter canard is so infuriating. 90%+ of Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful, and the <10% that were not saw scattered outbreaks of violence caused by a small minority of protesters, none of whom have been connected to the main Black Lives Matter organization but rather to anarchists of unknown affiliation. There is literally no connection whatsoever between millions of peaceful protestors seeking racial justice and an armed insurrection by far-right militants seeking to tear down American democracy in one fell swoop by storming the United States Capitol.

A startling fact that Rep. Cicilline offers: even Ivanka Trump—Trump’s favorite person in the world after himself and his alter-ego “John Barron”—couldn’t get her father to speak out about the violence as it was unfolding immediately after his speech. Another stunning fact: Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy got in a screaming match over the phone with McCarthy, like Ivanka, also failing to get him to act. Trump simply would not do anything. Not for over an hour and a half, which was an eternity given what was happening at the Capitol.

But there’s another, more urgent sense in which impeachment exists as an alternative to politics.

House impeachment investigators on Wednesday summoned John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, and two other top White House officials for depositions next week, according to a person familiar with the notices. The letters took the form of voluntary requests, rather than subpoenas.

The White House has argued that the Democratic impeachment inquiry is illegitimate because Trump did nothing wrong and there’s nothing to investigate, but each new piece of information—much less federal indictments—makes that harder to sustain.

The president likes to point out that some polls underestimated his support in the 2016 election and failed to predict his victory. But these impeachment polls aren’t interesting as a predictor of electoral success.

In fact, the Nixon impeachment left Weld with a renewed faith in the American system of government: “The wheels may grind slowly,” he later reflected, “but they grind pretty well.”

The Nixon impeachment spurred Charles L. Black, a Yale law professor, to write Impeachment: A Handbook, a slender volume that remains a defining work on the question.

ere is how impeachment would work in practice.

The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office.

As a House Judiciary Committee staff report put it in 1974, in the midst of the Watergate investigation: “The purpose of impeachment is not personal punishment; its function is primarily to maintain constitutional government.” Impeachable offenses, it found, included “undermining the integrity of office, disregard of constitutional duties and oath of office, arrogation of power, abuse of the governmental process, adverse impact on the system of government.”