Early last year, Democratic U.S. Rep Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, made a stirring — and prescient — final argument to the Senate in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, who had sought to blackmail the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.
"He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again," said Schiff, beseeching Republicans to convict and remove Trump from office. "He has compromised our elections and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What's right matters even less, and decency not at all."
Ignoring the truth in those words, the Republican Senate voted to acquit the president, who has gone on to bungle the federal response to a killer pandemic, bully election officials to commit crimes in an effort to overturn the results of a free and fair election, and in what we can only hope is his final monstrous act, unleashed a band of domestic terrorists on Congress last week, resulting in the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer who was attacked by the mob.
On Monday, to their everlasting credit, Democrats in Congress introduced articles of impeachment again. Trump will almost certainly have the distinction of becoming the only president in American history to be impeached twice.
Schiff takes little pleasure in having predicted Trump's future course so accurately. He is furious at the Republicans who have enabled Trump, especially those who did not stand up to correct the Big Lie that Trump foisted on his supporters after the election — that the contest was rigged, that he beat Biden "in a landslide."
"I do feel like grabbing people by the lapels and saying, 'Have you not had your eyes open?'" Schiff told me Sunday by phone from Washington. "'Did you not see this coming? Why weren't you listening? Did you not have any doubt about this man and what he was capable of?' All the warnings were there and we were not able to persuade them to act."
