Impeachment was always going to go down in flames. We knew that going in. It would pass the House, die in the Senate. Some argued that the certain futility made the exercise pointless, perhaps even prone to backfire.
Our attitude has been: Go down fighting.
What makes impeachment futile, what makes any advance on almost any front almost impossible, is the structure of our government, the enduring system of misrepresentation. The Founders preached that a legitimate government only exists with the consent of the governed, but what they created precludes that.
The House comes closest to representing the citizens of America, but gerrymandering and suppression tip the scales, sometimes profoundly. The Senate is a farce of democracy — Los Angeles County counts more citizens than 41 states. The Electoral College has twice this century chosen a President who lacks a majority of votes cast, and is on track for a third. A minority President and Senate have now appointed one quarter of lifetime federal judges, and two Supreme Court justices.
Changing any of this would require assent from the people who benefit from it.
That’s what we face. That’s what allows tyranny to take hold in America — it already has. It’s built in. We’re lucky as a nation that tyranny has taken this long to manifest itself, for purportedly representative government to veer so afar from the wishes of its citizens.
But it has, and here we are.