“He has been impeached forever”

“I think that we have pulled back a veil of behavior totally unacceptable to our founders, and that the public will see this with a clearer eye, an unblurred eye,” she said, adding: “Whatever happens, he has been impeached forever. And now these senators, though they don’t have the courage to assign the appropriate penalty, at least are recognizing that he did something wrong.”…

“It has raised the stakes,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a centrist freshman Democrat from New Jersey who faces a tough re-election challenge from the son of a popular former governor. “I don’t think it’s a loss. It illuminates that the next election isn’t just about whether we continue Trump’s crazy policies; it’s whether we remain a constitutional democracy. That is a debate I am absolutely confident we are winning.”

And at the end of the day, Mr. Trump will still go down as only the third president in American history to be impeached. It is an “ugly distinction,” in the words of Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, a progressive advocacy group.