QOTD -- Impeachment And The American Ideal

"This brings us back to impeachment. The question it poses is not whether it will be the thing that drives Donald Trump from office or whether it will be an unalloyed political boon for Democrats or other progressive forces in the country. It won’t be any of these things. Instead, the issue raised by impeachment is whether America, at this stage in its history, has what it takes to stand up against the forces of tyranny – whether there is still a passion among its people, and enough vitality in its institutions, to defend the American ideal against an unprecedented assault.
 
"Almost never has any American president, institution or electorate lived up fully to the country’s promise. But rarely has there been a president like Trump, one who treats America’s institutions and electoral processes with such contempt that he constitutes not just a failure of American promise but an existential threat to it. He and his enablers – men such as the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the attorney general, William Barr – have sought to create precedents which if allowed to stand move America dangerously towards tyranny, and the death of its highest ideals. They must not be ratified through the inaction of Congress or the people." -- Andrew Gawthorpe, historian, Leiden University, Netherlands.