I wrote about why impeachment is a bad idea today on the home page:

Unless there’s a thermonuclear revelation, impeachment will be an exercise in futility, inevitably ending with Trump’s Senate acquittal. There’s tsk-tsking in the press and among Democrats about Republicans holding the line. But GOP senators, by and large, are going to end up where their voters are. You can’t expect Republicans to be told, falsely, for two and a half years straight that some conspiracy with the Russians was going to be uncovered imminently and then accept at face value a five-alarm interpretation of Ukraine.

Democrats can point to the predicate of the Clinton impeachment. Although if Trump had flagrantly and repeatedly perjured himself, he’d have been impeached long ago. The lesson from the 1990s is: Yes, you can impeach in the absence of any real hope of convicting in the Senate, but it’s a lot of trouble to go through for basically a censure vote.

If Trump were for some reason actually removed on anything like the current universe of possible evidence, it would create a crisis of legitimacy at the heart of our government. Think of what the U.K. is going through with Brexit, only worse. Tens of millions of Trump voters would feel cheated and disenfranchised, and the roiling populism that Trump has tapped into would get stronger, not dissipate.