538 "The House Has Impeached President Trump. Here's What We Learned."

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-house-has-impeached-president-trump-heres-what-we-learned/

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Still, the impeachment of a president is a monumental event, so it’s worth looking at what we learned from these votes, and from the three-month process that led up to them.

Republicans defended some of Trump’s worst conduct

No House Republican voted for Trump’s impeachment, and that was not particularly surprising. Some Republicans in Congress did eventually break with President Nixon amid the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. But we are in a different time, with a Republican Party that is both more conservative and more willing to break traditional norms than it was in Nixon’s era.

What I did find surprising, however, was how House Republicans framed their opposition to impeachment. I expected a decent-sized bloc of House members to essentially take the following stance: “President Trump should not have tried to force the Ukranian government to start an investigation of the Bidens in order to receive military aid or be granted a White House visit, and we condemn soliciting help from a foreign government to win an election. But we don’t think this is an impeachable offense. We think whether Trump should remain president or not should be decided by the voters in 2020, an election that is not that far away.” Rep. John Katko of New York essentially said exactly that, and perhaps numerous other House Republicans gave versions of that argument to their constituents back home and I missed coverage of it.

But at least in the public hearings on Capitol Hill, House Republicans would not concede that Trump did anything wrong at all. Instead, they went out of their way to reject the extensive and detailed evidence that the Trump administration tried to force the Ukranian government to investigate the Bidens. GOP representatives also kept suggesting that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to hurt Trump in the same way that Russia did to hurt Hillary Clinton, which isn’t true.

This full-scale defense was not a given. Some House Republicans have, at times, rebuked Trump. Some did so in the aftermath of his refusal to condemn white nationalists marching in Charlottesville in 2017. Some did so after his comments earlier this year that several women of color serving in the House should “go back” to their home countries. Moreover, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, as well as numerous GOP figures outside of Congress, have criticized Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine, even if they have not necessarily cast his behavior as impeachment-worthy.

But in looking at their words and deeds over the past few months, House Republicans have effectively given Trump the green light to solicit other foreign governments to help him win next year’s election. It looks like House Republicans would defend Trump if he, for example, asked Saudi Arabia to investigate the Democratic nominee next year.

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The Democrats stuck together

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Party predicted votes, nothing else really did

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That’s not to say that the impeachment push didn’t matter. As I described above, the process has important implications — in terms of GOP party politics, the relationship between Congress and the presidency, and more. We have a president who both has been impeached and has a real chance of winning reelection. That may say more about this moment in U.S. history than anything else.

lots of snips, long article, worth reading it all