Let’s start with the good. The Democratic Party’s response to a whistleblower’s report that President Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to interfere in next year’s presidential election has been swift and strong. In endorsing an impeachment inquiry, Democratic leaders have united the party behind a true confrontation with the president of the kind progressives have longed for since the beginning of his administration—those earnest and freshly indignant days before #Resistance was a bitter joke at the party’s expense. Over the past several days, progressives, safe seat Democrats, and restless members of the House Judiciary Committee have been joined in their support for impeachment by moderates and Democrats from swing districts who have either bet that the party can bring a compelling exposition of Trump’s wrongdoing to the public or decided that the party’s waffling on the matter had become a political liability.

The path forward Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially set for House Democrats after endorsing impeachment was sound. According to a Politico report Tuesday, committee leaders heading the House’s already ongoing investigations were asked to “compile their arguments for impeachment and send them to the House Judiciary Committee,” which would have then been tasked with preparing a “package” of potential grounds for impeachment. Here, Pelosi’s instinct for caution served the party and the country well—as impatient progressives began urging the party to move speedily towards the drafting of articles of impeachment and a vote, Pelosi put the House on a course towards hearings that would help build the case against the president, on multiple fronts, over the next several months.



And now for the bad. House Democratic leaders have now decided on a speedy impeachment process after all—one focused primarily or even exclusively on Trump and Ukraine. “Democratic leaders see the evidence from the Zelenskiy call as damning enough to impeach—and easy enough for the public to digest—in isolation, without drawing in allegations of obstruction of justice, self-dealing and other wrongdoing,” The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker, Rachael Bade, and Robert Costa wrote Wednesday.



“Leaders began discussing a swift timeline to, in the words of one member, ‘strike while the iron’s hot’ and possibly vote on articles of impeachment before the end of the year.” Pelosi confirmed this at a press conference Thursday morning. “Our focus now is on this allegation,” she told reporters. “We’re seeing the evidence in front of us.” Last night, the Post additionally reported that House Democrats, at the behest of antsy freshmen, plan to review that evidence mostly in “closed-door interviews” with, in the words of one senior Democratic aide “very few hearings, if any.”



Things have moved quickly enough that it’s worth pausing to ask ourselves, again, the basic questions at hand here.

Things have moved quickly enough that it’s worth pausing to ask ourselves, again, the basic questions at hand here: Why should Trump be impeached and what should we hope an impeachment might accomplish? Four rationales come readily to mind.

