Wednesday’s impeachment of Donald Trump was neither a surprise nor a turning point. We’ve known for weeks that the House would vote to impeach. We also know, as surely as we can know anything in politics, that a Republican-controlled Senate won’t convict Trump and remove him from office; it may not even pretend to consider the evidence. So it would be easy to be cynical about the whole thing.
But that’s not how it felt. For me, and no doubt for millions of my fellow citizens, Wednesday was a very emotional day — a day of both despair and hope.