This editorial is desperate, ridiculous, and just plain dishonest. https://twitter.com/WSJopinion/status/1222911701533761536

The House managers conceded no such thing. The managers endorsed GAO's finding that holding funds to Ukraine was illegal impoundment. Schiff specifically argued it amounts to criminal bribery, and is encompassed in the abuse of power article. They're just lying.

They're affirming the admin's authoritarian logic: POTUS can't be criminally indicted, but House can't impeach without a crime. But Congress has no legit investigatory authority without court backing. But the courts can't enforce Congressional subpoenas, either. It's insane.

Also, getting caught red-handed trying to rig the next election is really nothing but a he said/she policy disagreement about the "public interest," impeaching on that basis is, "defining impeachment down," and invites a dangerous tit-for-tat spiral of partisan impeachments.

The underlying intellectual principle here is that no branch of government has no legitimate authority to second-guess anything the president does. But the obvious operative practical principle is that Republican authority is absolute and Democratic power is illegitimate.

Rs formerly worked behind the anti-majoritarian character of the Constitution to uphold their view that only the white non-urban minority has a valid claim to rule. Now that our one proportional representative body is out of their reach, they're attacking the Constitution itself.

If we survive this full-on Constitutional crisis, the silver lining is that Trump's overt ethnonationalist populism has forced Republicans into bracing clarity about the fragility of their conditional allegiance to the Constitution, republican government, and the American people.

It's very revealing that Republican disregard for the Constitutional role and authority of the house of congress the Framer's intended to most directly represent and defend the interests of the republic's citizens is practically total now that it's well out of their control.

A Constitution that gives even a modicum of real power to the American majority is simply unacceptable now that it is overwhelmingly multicultural and urban. When forced to choose between an authoritarian firewall against the majority and the Constitution, the R choice is clear.

I find this totally sickening, but there it is, in the WSJ, on our TVs. It's no wonder that McConnell has done everything in his power to keep the American people from tuning in and witnessing their putative representatives in the Senate take a chainsaw to the tree of liberty.