Tom Nichols and Philippe Reines

Opinion contributors

The Trump administration has created some unusual realignments among Americans, and the two of us are Exhibit A. We have spent very different lives in and around national politics, one for years as a (now former) Republican, the other as a Democrat. For most of our careers, we would not have agreed about very much, and those disagreements, for the most part, remain. We both voted for Hillary Clinton — but for very different reasons and without remotely the same level of enthusiasm.

But we have both long argued that President Donald Trump should be impeached, and we both now have concerns about how that process might unfold.

We are realists, adults without illusions, who have worked in Washington and who know the chance of Trump being removed from office is, as of this writing, close to zero. But we both see Trump’s impeachment as a constitutional duty, and we are relieved that the House Democrats finally decided, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in quoting Thomas Paine, that “the times have found us” for impeachment.

Searing impeachment choices ahead

But if Trump is likely to survive this process, what is the point?

Impeachment, in our view, serves more purposes than removal and should proceed without the certainty of a slam-dunk conviction in the Senate. Indeed, the process has more, rather than less, legitimacy if the outcome is not entirely predetermined by partisanship.

And circumstances can change quickly. If we have learned anything in the age of Trump, it is never to say “never.” After all, when the Senate opened hearings against President Richard Nixon in 1973, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans favored impeaching a man who had only a year earlier won reelection in a 49-state landslide. Then, as now, the GOP was primed to protect the president — but only until the weight of Watergate became too much and senior Republicans went to Nixon to tell him it was time to go.

It is reasonable to believe that voters who gave Democrats a record midterm win last year did so with the belief Trump would finally be held accountable for actions the Republicans all too willingly condoned. And so Pelosi and her fellow leaders now face searing choices as they embark on a journey that no matter the outcome will inflict significant and lasting pain on our country. As she put it Wednesday on a call with House Democrats, Trump is “almost not worth it … but the Constitution is.”

In less than three years, the president has committed scores of potentially impeachable offenses, and it would be reckless to try to bring him to account for all of them. (Impeachment, it bears repeating yet again, is a political judgment, not a legal finding.) How should the Democrats decide which ones to pursue? One article of impeachment, or 20? Republicans think the right number of charges is “none,” while Democrats — rightly — could come up with dozens.

Four reasons to impeach Trump

We believe the House should pursue a limited, but varied, set of articles revolving around abuse of power and obstruction of justice. Impeachment should serve as a reminder that there are many more offenses against the Constitution than outright treason or bribery. The Founders inserted a broad category of “high crimes and misdemeanors” to capture what James Madison called “the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief magistrate.” (Actual incapacity would later be remedied by the 25th Amendment, whose defects should by now be obvious to all, but that is a subject for another day once our current national crisis is over.)

Trump should be impeached for abuse of his office, obstruction of justice, breaking campaign finance laws and violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. The primary articles will bring into sharp relief that this president endangered the nation for his own self-serving purposes, while the emoluments charges should be a reminder of a sacred principle to which we seem to have somehow become numb: The president can never monetize his or her time in office.

The exchange with the Ukrainian president, in which Trump subjugated the national interest and U.S. national security to his own political impulses, is a strikingly obvious and impeachable abuse of power. Trump, anticipating this, is already making the argument — echoed by his congressional minions — that it is reckless to impeach him for one phone call. We are confident that other such incidents will be uncovered, and while the Ukraine call was the straw that seems to have broken the camel’s back, it is not the only straw that matters.

Don't relitigate Mueller report

This is why the Democrats should proceed with more than one article under the abuse of power. It should include Trump telling the Russians he doesn’t care that they interfered in the 2016 election (assuming Congress can confirm this reporting with documents or witnesses). Admitting that privately to the Russians violates Trump's oath to protect and defend the United States, and implicitly grants permission for the Kremlin to do it again in 2020 — an invitation Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly and gleefully accepted.

Meanwhile, we know for a fact that Trump has urged China to investigate Joe Biden, because he did it in public Thursday in front of the White House. This is another impeachable offense.

At this point, there is little value in relitigating former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, because Trump, Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s transcribers in the conservative media have successfully smeared Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaigned “welcomed” Russian help — a conclusion that would have doomed any other president in any better time. But the multiple instances of obstruction that followed once Trump was in office, part of a pattern of executive abuses, are eminently impeachable.

Likewise, the House should remind Americans that the president is, in effect, an unindicted co-conspirator in the violation of multiple campaign finance laws. Trump has always benefited from each new outrage sucking the oxygen out every previous scandal. But the fact remains that he paid off women for their silence as a means of furthering his campaign.

Boorishness is not impeachable

In fact, Trump signed these hush money checks after being sworn into office, maybe even on the Resolute Desk itself. Were Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. still the man he was back in 1999, he might argue — as he did against President Bill Clinton — that there are offenses of character worthy of impeachment, and these are easily among them.

Democrats and disaffected independents must, at this point, exhibit prudence over passion. (There are so few disaffected Republicans that they are not worth discussing, at this point, but we can still hope that at least some GOP senators will, at long last, rediscover their decency when their country needs it most.) It is tempting to impeach Trump merely for being Trump, exercising the power to remove him, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, merely because he has “rendered himself obnoxious.”

But impeachment is not a remedy for aesthetic differences or boorishness. This is only the fourth time in U.S. history that impeachment proceedings have been initiated against a president, and in our view, it is certainly the most deserved. Even more than Andrew Johnson’s obstinance, Richard Nixon’s panicked cover-up or Bill Clinton’s personal misconduct, no chief executive has placed the United States in more peril for less reason than Trump. No presidents have so flagrantly continued to commit the same transgressions despite their previous acts being brought to light.

Americans must confront this danger

Refusing to confront Trump serves only to embolden him. It should be a lesson to us all that the call to Ukraine’s president July 25 occurred the day after Trump declared victory over and vindication from the Mueller report. When a crime is tolerated, it is repeated.

Finally, there is the question of a timeline for the House process. In a reversal of "hurry up and wait," House leadership chose to wait to begin and hurry to finish. Such haste is self-imposed, and it is as rooted in political consideration as the decision of whether to proceed at all. The three House committees tasked with conducting the inquiry under the speaker’s leadership have proceeded expeditiously yet painstakingly. That balance should be continued without undue consideration of the calendar. We both have faith that if the public is included in the process, and kept informed at every step, they will support a genuine search for the truth.

Whether it fails or succeeds in the Senate, the House should impeach Trump as an exercise in the restoration of civic health. Americans must confront, yet again, the potentially dangerous nature of their own institutions of government if those institutions are allowed to function without some kind of commitment to public spirit, patriotism and trust from the people who occupy them.

Tom Nichols is a national security expert, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of "The Death of Expertise." Philippe Reines, a former deputy assistant secretary of State and a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, co-hosts the "UNREDACTED" podcast and is a visiting lecturer at Tufts University’s Tisch College. Follow them on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom and @PhilippeReines