Thread by @YAppelbaum

1. It’s not too early.
It won’t backfire.
It’s what the Constitution demands.
Congress must open a formal impeachment inquiry, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs. My cover story for @TheAtlantic:
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

2. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.

3. By refusing to act on impeachment, Congress has allowed the pressure to build, and it’s distorting every part of the system. Unelected bureaucrats are disregarding the president’s orders; courts are striking them down. The damage to our institutions is mounting.

4. There are many charges that have been leveled against the president. But the most serious allegations against him ultimately rest on the charge that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy. That is the situation impeachment was devised to address.

5. The received wisdom on impeachment, the overlearned lesson of the Clinton years, is that House Republicans got out ahead of public opinion, and turned a president beset by scandal into a sympathetic figure.

6. But that’s the wrong lesson. The public, and the Senate, rejected the impeachment of Clinton as partisan. But many of the president’s fiercest critics come from his own party; they have been clear about the threat they feel he poses to democracy.

7. The process of impeachment safeguards the constitutional order in five distinct ways. First, it redirects the conversation away from a president’s provocations, and toward his debilities. Presidents discover previously unimagined capacities for public restraint.

8. Second, it paralyzes a wayward president’s ability to advance the undemocratic elements of his agenda. Impeachment puts the president’s own job on the line, raising the stakes of unconstitutional acts, and absorbing his attention.

9. Impeachment is also a vital tool of discovery and discernment. It surfaces new facts. Just as important, the process helps separate wild, conspiratorial allegations from well-evidenced charges.

10. The fourth benefit of impeachment is that it defuses the potential for political violence. This was the rationale Ben Franklin offered at the Constitutional Convention. Trump has warned “the people would revolt” if he were impeached. History suggests the opposite.

11. The fifth benefit of impeachment is that, even when it fails to remove an unfit president, it severely damages his political prospects.

12. So impeachment works. In fact, it’s the very efficacy of past efforts that should give Congress pause; it’s a process that should be triggered only when a president’s betrayal of his basic duties requires it.

13. The history of impeachment is a useful guide, but the relevant precedent isn’t Clinton—it’s Andrew Johnson. We need to recover the real story of Johnson’s impeachment, because it offers the best evidence that the current president, too, must be impeached.

14. Johnson, @TheAtlantic wrote in 1866, “unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of demagogue and autocrat,” adding that he was “egotistic to the point of mental disease” and had become “the prey of intriguers and sycophants.”

15. Congressional Republicans, in the aftermath of the Civil War, sought to build a new social order in the South, enshrining equality and protecting civil rights. Johnson wanted to make America a white man’s country again. The two visions were irreconcilable.

16. Johnson was impeached, tried—and ultimately acquitted. But impeachment frustrated his efforts to preserve a “white man’s government,” forcing him to defer to Congress on the key questions of Reconstruction.

17. Today, Congress must again decide whether the greater risk lies in executing the Constitution as it was written, or in deferring to voters to do what it cannot muster the courage to do itself.

18. There’s more—much more—in the article itself. I urge you to read it. I hope it will convince you that impeachment is a rule-bound process for judging a president’s fitness to continue in office, and that it’s needed now. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…