Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic: “In the absence of any prospect of a sufficient bloc of Republicans voting to remove the president, it’s easy to write off the impeachment process as meaningless. It’s not. Done properly, the House’s amassing of a record and the Senate’s trial of the president will create a vivid account of Trump’s abuses of power and criminality on the national stage. It will force Republicans to shackle themselves to those abuses in support of the president. The stakes of whether a majority of voting Americans will vote for a party that has done so—or at least a majority in the states necessary to swing the Electoral College—are high. But a Senate trial of the president will pose the matter to the electorate with the starkness it deserves.”

“It will make Senate Republicans cast a vote for the proposition ‘LOL nothing matters ¯\_(ツ)_/¯’—thereby enabling the 2020 electorate to evaluate nihilism as the governing philosophy of a political movement.”