It was a sad day—on that, at least, everyone could agree. On her way to the House floor, soon after 9 A.M., to begin the historic debate on the impeachment of Donald Trump, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, told reporters that she felt “sad.” She and other Democrats had coördinated to dress in funereal black, a sartorial nod to the moment. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, was also “sad,” he told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning, because Democrats wanted only to impeach Trump and prevent him from doing his “amazing” work—an observation that the President liked so much that he promptly tweeted it.
Once the debate began, marching toward a preordained outcome that, by the end of the day, would make Trump just the third President in American history to be impeached by the House, Democrats and Republicans agreed on nothing except the very melancholy nature of the occasion. They very vigorously disagreed on the reasons for their sadness, but, still, they all wanted us to know: this was a solemn, sombre, prayerful time. Their hearts were heavy; their decisions were not taken lightly. It was a “sad day of an impeachment charade,” and a generally “sad day in the people’s House.” The Democrat John Lewis, the legendary civil-rights leader from Georgia, announced that Wednesday was a “sad day,” “not a day of joy,” as he urged his colleagues to consider their “moral obligation” to impeach Trump. Bill Johnson, a Republican from Ohio, concurred that it was a “sad day for America,” then offered his debate time as a moment of silence for the sixty-three million Trump voters whose votes, he said, the Democrats would silence with their attempt to remove Trump from office.
But it was not a sad day on Capitol Hill—not really. There were no tears, no sudden shocks or surprises. Trump’s impeachment was mostly just another crazy, divisive moment in his crazy, divisive Presidency—an inevitable day, a predictable day, a partisan day, a long day, and, in the end, a historic day. There was rage, real and feigned. There were speeches, dozens and dozens of them. When I arrived on Capitol Hill in the morning, it was a bright, sunny day, and before going into the Capitol I watched as a protester toting a “Criminal in Chief” sign chased after the Republican Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s loudest television surrogates, begging to talk to him. “I’m not even trolling you!” she said breathlessly. But, of course, nobody really wanted to talk to anybody. Gaetz did not stop to talk to the protester, at least not that I saw. Inside the Capitol, the members did not really talk to one another, either, despite the hours of debate. The vote was set; the outcome was known; the country was divided.
When it was all over, the result was what we expected it would be when Pelosi, in September, decided to start an impeachment inquiry into Trump’s scheme to hijack American foreign policy toward Ukraine in service of his personal political interests. Democrats viewed the Ukraine affair as a Trumpian “crime spree in progress,” as the California Democrat Eric Swalwell put it, and voted to impeach. Republicans, and Trump himself, denied that Trump had done anything wrong at all and argued that impeaching the President was, in the words of the Ohio Republican Jim Jordan “unfair,” “dangerous,” and “harmful to our country.” Doug Collins, who had started this day with sad outrage on “Fox & Friends,” ended it with loud outrage in the well of the House, screaming at his Democratic colleagues, “You did it! You did it! You did it!” Soon after, it was over, and Trump was impeached. Pelosi called it “a very sad day to protect the Constitution of the United States.”
Shortly past 8:30 P.M., the first article of impeachment, charging Trump with abuse of power related to Ukraine, passed on a party-line vote, 230–197. Shortly after that, the second article, charging Trump with obstruction of Congress, passed as well, 229–198. Two Democrats voted no on both articles, including Jeff Van Drew, of New Jersey, who has said that he will quit his party and become a Republican. One Democrat, the long-shot Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, voted present. And one very recently former Republican, Justin Amash, voted yes. Amash, a conservative who was one of the founding members of the House Freedom Caucus, announced this past summer that he was supporting impeachment, even before the Ukraine inquiry, and had to leave his party after the resulting outcry. Amash had lectured his ex-colleagues, “This president will be in power for only a short time, but excusing his misbehavior will forever tarnish your name.” They had disregarded him, of course, and, when the moment of impeachment came, Trump was in Amash’s Michigan district, blaring out his innocence to a crowd of thousands of screaming supporters in the Battle Creek arena. “It doesn’t really feel like we’re being impeached,” Trump said. And also, “We did nothing wrong.”
Twenty-one years ago plus one day, which was the last time the House of Representatives held such a debate, in the case of William Jefferson Clinton, impeachment seemed both more consequential and less predictable. The rancorous Saturday-morning debate, on December 19, 1998, over impeaching a President for lying under oath about an extramarital affair, began with Bob Livingston, the presumptive new Republican Speaker, surprising everyone by resigning from the House after being forced to reveal his own extramarital affairs. It was a wild day, and no one knew what might happen next. Politicians in both parties faced a moment of reckoning for the lying and hypocrisy that were so clearly in evidence on both sides of the aisle.
There was no such reckoning this time. The impeachment of Trump turned out to exclude the unanticipated; it was another day of impasse between an unrepentant President and a recalcitrant Democratic House. The feeling in the capital was one of resignation, with the conclusion so predicted and so predictable that it seemed less of a crisis than Clinton’s long-ago impeachment, not more. And yet the impeachment of Trump is arguably more consequential, in every way, for American democracy: a sign of a country in the midst of an ongoing political crisis that this President, unlike his impeached predecessor, welcomes and exacerbates. Clinton had begun his second term in office vowing to be the “repairer of the breach,” and, if he did not do that, Clinton did express contrition and remorse, which he may or may not have felt, on the eve of his impeachment. He vowed to move on.
That is not Donald Trump’s way. Minutes after Pelosi banged down the gavel on his impeachment, the President was onstage in Michigan, musing out loud about the late, legendary Michigan representative John Dingell looking up from hell as his wife, Debbie Dingell, voted with the Democrats to impeach. Trump will never say that he is sorry, and his supporters will never demand it of him. On the House floor, Barry Loudermilk, a little-known Trump devotee from Georgia, actually claimed that Trump was being treated worse than Jesus had been by the Roman prefect who ordered his execution. This was laughable, but in some ways the Republicans were almost all Barry Loudermilks on Wednesday, endorsing an array of fanciful excuses for the President that were just as implausible, if not so comically ahistorical. It was McCarthyism, a day that would live in infamy, like Pearl Harbor, they said. Trump never demanded that Ukraine investigate his political rival Joe Biden. Trump is a noble anti-corruption crusader.
The fight now heads to the Senate, where the Republican majority is expected to offer another all but unanimous G.O.P. vote to acquit Trump, following a trial that has little prospect of featuring a single witness. Pelosi, in fact, hinted, on Wednesday night, that she is not ready to send over the articles of impeachment just yet; “we’ll see,” she said, whether Republicans in the other chamber are really ready to have a fair trial. But, whenever a Senate trial happens, it’s certain that Trump will claim complete and total vindication from it, and that Democrats will blame Senate Republicans for failing to hold him to account. With the result in so little suspense, Washington has been consumed in recent days by the politics of this presumed outcome, reading the latest batch of polls as if they were runes from the future that can reveal how this all plays out in the 2020 election. But that is, as yet, unknowable. For now, what the polls show is exactly what Wednesday’s impeachment debate showed: the stubborn, unyielding reality of a country divided, of an America whose views are fixed about Trump and about everything else.
