The House voted for an impeachment inquiry, and Republicans failed a test of character There isn’t much more ground to cover between the historic vote on Halloween and the final immolation of the Republican Party.

Tom Nichols | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump's Ukraine phone call: U.S. and Ukraine relationship, explained U.S. and Ukraine relations go further back than the now infamous phone call between Trump and Zelensky. We explain their relationship.

The process of impeachment has begun. The House has passed a resolution “directing certain committees to continue their ongoing investigations as part of the existing House of Representatives inquiry into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach Donald John Trump, president of the United States of America."

Impeachment is now virtually inevitable. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi previewed the major charge that will be laid against the president — abuse of power — when she made repeated reference to Trump’s belief that Article II of the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants.

A nearly party-line decision

Thursday’s vote was quick and anticlimactic. But it is historic in three respects:

►Obviously, it is leading us toward only the third attempted removal of a sitting president in the modern era. (It is the third as well in my lifetime; I was a young paperboy in 1974 and delivered the evening edition with the blaring headline NIXON RESIGNS.) While impeachment articles did not reach a floor vote in Richard Nixon’s case, Trump is, to put it mildly, unlikely to resign, so we will have the second Senate trial of a president in two decades.

►We have never put a president on trial for endangering national security, but this will be an undercurrent in the abuse of power accusation against Trump. Andrew Johnson was impeached for defying the law and for being a generally reprehensible human being. (Trump’s most fervent critics probably would like to impose that latter condition, but overall odiousness is not the standard for removing a president.) Nixon was forced from office for abuse of power, among other charges. Bill Clinton was in the dock for lying and obstruction.

►Trump will be charged with all of those things, and rightly so. But it should shock us, if we are still capable of shock at all, that he engaged in these impeachable acts as a way of placing his own interests above the national interest. Johnson, Nixon and Clinton were at war with their domestic opponents. Trump weakened Ukraine, a friend at war with Russia, our worst foreign enemy. Donald Trump did so purely because he wanted the new president of a country under siege to perform a personal service for Donald Trump in exchange for help and military aid that was already authorized by the duly elected representatives of the United States of America.

Other presidents have engaged in offenses against the Constitution to save their skins when caught in various kinds of wrongdoing. Trump has attacked the Constitution for his own gain while endangering the national security of the United States. This astonishing, almost surreal fact will itself make this impeachment like no other confrontation between the branches of government in American history.

The Grand Old Party could crumble before our eyes

This is not only the beginning of impeachment. It is also potentially the beginning of the end of the Republican Party.

This is not because Trump will be removed. To the contrary, the Republican base — which will embrace the arguments of congressional Republicans about fairness and “Soviet-style” hearings — may well dig in and decide to vote for Trump again in 2020 against all evidence and reason, much as many of them did in 2016.

Rather, this is the end of the Republican Party as the representative of any kind of coherent political movement. The end of the GOP as anything but a cult of personality has been in the cards for some time now, as Trump has crashed through one constitutional barrier after another while some Republicans defended him and others dithered, hoping to avoid the wrath of their most vocal primary voters.

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Trump has destroyed so many norms of American life we once took for granted that there is no space to list them all, from the denigration of veterans to the adoration of dictators, from abandoning the basic dignity we expect from a chief executive to inuring us to lies so numerous that fact-checkers have been nearly defeated in their efforts to keep up.

Trashing the foundations of our political life, however, is not an impeachable offense. Republicans, of course, are arguing that this is nothing more than an attempt by Trump’s opponents to overturn the 2016 election, and if the only basis for impeachment were that Trump is a sociopathic ignoramus, the GOP would be right to insist that this is a matter for the voters and the Electoral College.

Republicans battening down hatches

Instead, Republicans have now chosen to double down against impeachment in violation of every principle the GOP once claimed to cherish.

Limited government? Trump has argued that impeachment does not apply to him, and that he is beyond even being investigated for any wrongdoing. Republicans agree. The party of national security? Trump cheers on the Republicans trying to subvert closed hearings — the kind they themselves defended when investigating the Benghazi disaster — as they barge into classified facilities with unsecured electronic devices. The guardians of patriotism? Trump enablers derided a decorated combat veteran for even daring to speak the truth about Trump’s misconduct.

The House Republicans have clearly decided to throw themselves on the pyre of Donald Trump’s burning presidency. The last act of this tragedy — and impeachment, no matter how it turns out, is a national tragedy — will be when Senate Republicans meekly submit to the will of Donald Trump and acquit him, like terrified jurors under the glaring eye of a Mafia boss who knows their names.

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There isn’t much more ground to cover between the historic Halloween vote and the final immolation of the Republican Party. The GOP will fail this test of character. What is more important is whether the American nation passes it and demands the impeachment and removal of the greatest threat to the United States Constitution ever to come from the Oval Office.

Tom Nichols is a national security expert, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of "The Death of Expertise." Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom