Not to be too literary about this, but the impeachment is a kind of illustration of the larger tension between “moving on” and actually doing the work of contending with what happened. At the risk of tweeting before I’ve had my second cup of coffee, i have a few thoughts.

I’m seeing a lot about how embarrassing this process is, but, well, no one said politics was fun. I would maybe argue that this process - while unlikely to result in conviction - has done a better job really contending with what has happened than we’ve seen in the past. 2/

The Clinton impeachment *should* have been about his conduct and instead it was a stupid circus and a years-long pointless debate about what “high crimes and misdemeanors” meant. Not about what the president actually did - which deserved a tough conversation.

I don’t have a strong opinion on whether Ford’s pardon of Nixon was right, but in retrospect Watergate feels very unfinished to me, like an argument we abandoned and never settled. So while this process hasn’t been great this week, it’s long been very very partisan and ...

And for whatever reason, we are really really bad at this business of facing tough questions and debating about accountability. This has actually been an improvement in my opinion.