But the GOP wasn’t able to exact any such price at the ballot box. They actually lost seats in 2000, while their presidential nominee was barely able to squeak out a slight electoral college victory (itself much contested) on the back of a popular vote loss. The Democrats might be more successful — Trump remains deeply unpopular, after all, and in any objective sense the charges against Trump are far more serious. But they might fail, and see the GOP rally ever harder around their corrupt standard-bearer, and wear the badge of condemnation as proudly as they wore the epithet, “deplorable.”

Impeachment in partisan times asks the side of the accused to affirm they’re distinctly and specifically at fault, to the point that they cannot be trusted with the enforcement of the law — and to accept those accusations from their hated opponents. To achieve that acceptance requires separating the accused from his supporters, convincing them that his crimes were crimes against them, not crimes undertaken for them and against their opponents. The law itself ultimately rests on a foundation of political consensus, the belief that all sides benefit more from a fair application of neutral rules than from undermining them for the sake of short-term advantage. And political consensus has been in short supply these days.