"That is a tragedy," said Philip Bobbitt, a Columbia University law professor and a leading expert on the history of impeachment. The framers of the Constitution were careful to design a process for removing a president from office that they hoped would rise above the nation's petty political squabbles, he said. "They did everything possible to prevent that from happening, and we are plunging headlong into it," Bobbitt said. US President Donald Trump has stonewalled the inquiry. Credit:Bloomberg Determined not to let Trump and his Republican allies in Congress derail their efforts with legal delays or time-consuming diversions, Democrats have abandoned all but a semblance of comity as they press forward quickly to charge the president with high crimes and misdemeanours. They are set to begin debating articles of impeachment this week — with House Judiciary Committee members bracing for the possibility of late-night sessions in an office building near the Capitol — as they race to complete a streamlined proceeding based on their conclusion that Trump abused his power by trying to solicit help from Ukraine in the 2020 reelection.

Upset by the rapid pace of the inquiry and frustrated by Democratic rules he said are unfair — including the lack of subpoena power for the White House — Trump is simply refusing to engage. In a significant departure from previous impeachments, Trump's lawyer signalled in a letter on Friday that the President would not take part in the House proceedings. Loading While Democrats who control the House are focused on a swift impeachment vote by year's end, the White House is almost entirely consumed by the trial that would follow in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Trump's team believes he would have the chance to defend himself and where Democrats would almost certainly fall short of the two-thirds vote they would need to remove him from office. That proceeding, however, is also full of unknowns. At a meeting with senior White House officials and senators in the Roosevelt Room of the White House almost three weeks ago, Republican Senator Ted Cruz made clear that there are not enough Senate votes to approve some of the edgier witnesses that Democrats and Republicans want to call. While he mentioned no names, it was interpreted by those in the room to refer to people like Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice-President Joe Biden, whom Trump pushed Ukraine to investigate. In the House, though, the President is eager to see Republicans and his lawyers mount a robust assault on what he calls a "hoax" and a "scam" led by "crazy" and "dishonest" Democrats.

"What they are doing here is discrediting a system," Bobbitt said of the White House impeachment strategy. "If the system is discredited, it cannot discredit me. It is brilliant in its way but totally cynical and completely destructive of our values." Loading Politics have always been a powerful factor in presidential impeachment inquiries, which have roiled the nation twice in the last 50 years. But impeachment has occupied a special place in the American consciousness. Veterans of the process said there had been an understanding, even amid bouts of intense political combat, that both sides had an obligation to the Constitution that should be honoured, regardless of partisan affiliation. "No one was looking at the other side with the kind of contempt that both sides look at each other now," said Julian Epstein, who served as the chief Democratic counsel to the House Judiciary Committee when Republicans tried to force Clinton from office.