I've written about this before, but I am haunted by the fact that Donald Trump occupied the same office as did George Washington, that this man with no scruples nor any value at all as human being was given the same responsibilities as one with such a code of honor.

And I feel the same way as I look at the Republicans in the US Senate and think that when one generation had its Hamiltons or Jeffersons or Madisons we have Hawley and Cruz and McConnell. The hopes and aspirations of the country are no less.

The challenges are if anything greater. And yet, our government is at risk as it has been seldom before in its history because it is so full of men and women of dubious character if they have any at all.

While we have good men and women too, and our current President and Vice President are at the forefront of any such lists, it is uncertain as of yet whether the decay we have seen over the past few years can be contained.

That, in the end, is what this impeachment is about, what the last election and the next will be about, what the work of the current Congress and its immediate successors will be about. We have great examples to admire from our past. But they seem at times very remote.

I wish every American would spend some time with our history, considering its lessons and our defects, how we succeeded from time to time and why we have faltered. Because we are still at a moment of great consequence and uncertainty.

We must be as resolved as we ever have been as a nation to recognize the threats among us and to defeat them fully and irrevocably. The work, in short, begun in these last two election cycles, has just begun and the shocking events of the past month...

...on the steps and in the halls of the Capitol on 1/6 & in the chamber of the Senate this week must outrage us, must be seen as intolerable, must be reversed by whatever legal possible or we will be betraying the legacy of those who have given so much and led so well before us.

This may seem overly dramatic to some of you. I wish it were. But I think it is not.