The trivialization of impeachment

Really good article from Andrew McCarthy.  My emphasis in bold:

There will be deep, bitter public protest because impeachment, on the facts before us, is objectively foolhardy. Trump’s missteps do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. If they did, Democrats would not fear voting to conduct the impeachment inquiry, and they would proudly hold their hearings in public with due process, rather than behind closed doors with selective leaking.

Moreover, we are just one year out from an election in which, if Trump is as bad as Democrats say, the voters will remove him. Yet, Trump’s approval rating hovers at around 43 percent, close to what Obama’s was a year before his reelection. Trump could certainly lose, but he stands a decent chance of being reelected. Hence far from a strong consensus for his removal, there will be zealous protest against impeachment by a significant segment of the public. Consequently, the Republican-controlled Senate will swiftly reject the House Democrats’ impeachment articles as a partisan stunt — as precisely the abuse of power the Framers feared. And woe betide the next Democratic president seeking the bipartisan cooperation needed to govern.

Our constitutional system will be damaged because impeachment will be discredited. That will not make it any less indispensable than Madison judged it to be. Yet its invocation will be even less likely in some grievous future instance, when a presidential abuse of power actually does imperil the nation. We will have a virtually omnipotent president. As a practical matter, there will be no viable congressional check — no impeachment, no power of the purse — to rein the president in. The powers of the competing political branches will be in gross imbalance, making functional separation of powers impossible.

As the Framers would tell us, that is not a prescription for the preservation of liberty.

The House of Representatives has already rejected moving forward on impeachment on three separate votes; the last one couldn't even get the majority of Democrats to support it.  But Nancy Pelosi has decided that she is the House now and Trump needs to be removed before the voters can be allowed to make such a monumental decision themselves.