What about impeaching Donald Trump

But what about impeachment?

There is a general bipartisan consensus among national politicians that it’s too early to start an impeachment effort.

The election, after all, wasn’t too long ago. The investigations are still in relatively early stages. Though a few stray Democrats in Congress have expressed support for impeachment (and many of the party’s voters have in polls), the vast majority of both Democratic and Republican politicians have shied away from doing so so far.

I’ve written a longer explainer on impeachment, but the most important thing to know is that while it looks and feels a whole lot like a legal or judicial process, in practice it is dominated by politics from start to finish. Rather than being run by any courts, impeachment and any ensuing presidential trial are carried out by the House of Representatives and the Senate, which are partisan bodies.

It is true that if a sitting president of the United States stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shot a random person in broad daylight, and was caught with a smoking gun, it’s probably a safe bet that Congress would put partisanship aside and vote

to impeach him, convict him, and remove him from office for high crimes. (Probably.)

But most political scandals are not so indisputable, damning, and well-documented. And on any matter where there is some sort of plausible deniability for the president, his political allies will have very strong incentive to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if it means twisting themselves into knots.

Overall, the necessary condition for any impeachment effort to have a chance of succeeding and removing Trump from office is bipartisan participation.

Republicans will control the House until at least 2019, and even if Democrats retake the chamber in the midterm elections, the threshold for convicting Trump in the Senate is so high — 67 senators must vote to do it — that it’s essentially impossible for Democrats to reach without a good deal of Republican help.

So if extremely damning evidence of some very serious presidential crime emerges, and proves sufficient to finally turn a very large chunk of the president’s party openly against him, that is when impeachment and conviction becomes a real possibility. But if the topic remains partisan, nothing will come of it.