Impeachment would be a redundant judgment

There are many reasons to oppose an impeachment at this time: One is that no one has made a very persuasive case for one, all of the Democrats’ arguments up to this point having been transparently pretextual. Another is that the Republican majority in the Senate all but ensures that the process would be purely symbolic, an exercise in chaos for pleasure’s sake. A third is that it normalizes the invocation of a procedure that should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances in the service of ordinary short-term partisan interests. For comparison, consider that there was no serious impeachment talk when Barack Obama authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress — or when he took executive actions that he himself had described as unconstitutional only months before. That suggests a pretty high standard — and if “I think that guy is a fink!” ends up being a common rationale for impeachment, then you’d better make your peace with anarchy, because Washington is going to be a ghost town.

But the most important reason for forbearance here is that a political judgment already has been rendered on Donald Trump’s character — and, if you don’t like how that came out, there’s another chance right around the corner.