The eighty-five-day sprint to impeachment managed by Nancy Pelosi was the most amazingly swift and brilliantly orchestrated Congressional effort in modern history. Pelosi had been—smartly—resistant to impeachment, but when Trump released his transcript and thereby not only dared the Democrats to nail him but revealed that he was already trying to rig the 2020 election, she went at him like a heat-seeking missile. She made the savvy call to make Adam Schiff and not Gerry Nadler the impeachment manager. She oversaw the collection of a remarkable amount of utterly damning evidence and testimony in just a few weeks despite a total stonewalling by the White House, made sure that the White Supremacist Party failed in their effort to derail the hearings, rejected the notion of pressuring her caucus in regards to final roll call, and in the end lost only two votes. It’s impossible to exaggerate how difficult this whole process was to pull off or how masterfully Pelosi and the House Democrats executed it. Trumpists and so-called progressives who think that politics is an intellectual exercise and not something involving humans love to disparage Pelosi as a soulless creature of compromise, but what she is is the best American legislative politician since World War II. And she has totally gotten inside Trump’s head, too. We are damn fortunate to have her at this existential moment in American history. If you aren’t ready to give up the American experiment—for better and for worse—the Democrats are literally the only show in town.

Yesterday we saw politicians commit acts of real courage. Twenty-eight of the thirty-one House Democrats who represent districts that Trump carried in 2016 risked their political futures to vote to impeach Trump on both articles. This is something that should be celebrated and that should inspire all of us in these dark days.

These are yesterday’s Profiles in Courage: Tom O'Halleran (Ariz.), Lucy McBath (Ga.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.), Lauren Underwood (Ill.), Cindy Axne (Iowa), Abby Finkenauer (Iowa), Dave Loebsack (Iowa), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Haley Stevens (Mich.), Angie Craig (Minn.), Susie Lee (Nev.), Chris Pappas (N.H.), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), Andy Kim (N.J.), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.), Xochitl Torres Small (N.M.), Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.), Antonio Delgado (N.Y.), Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.), Max Rose (N.Y.), Kendra Horn (Okla.), Matt Cartwright (Pa.), Conor Lamb (Pa.), Joe Cunningham (S.C.), Ben McAdams (Utah), Elaine Luria (Va.), Abigail Spanberger (Va.), Ron Kind (Wis.)

Jared Golden (Maine) voted for the first article of impeachment but against the second.

Conversely, yesterday will always be known for the White Supremacist Party’s full-throated, snarling rejection of the Constitution in favor of outright fascism. The televised hearings revealed in living color how the former Republican Party is now the party of white men, by white men, and for white men. (Only one African American remains in the House GOP caucus, and he is leaving.) The howling, nasty mob on the White Supremacist Party side of the aisle not only looks nothing like the real America, it wants no part of it. The Profiles in Cravenness Award (there was never any doubt) goes to the White Supremacist Party members in the House. If you dream of slitting the throat of Lady Liberty and permanently replacing her with a corrupt, vicious, misogynous, and utterly immoral tyrant with testicles that will never drop, this is your tribe.
           
We’re talking about politicians here, so not surprisingly we have one more award to dole out—the Profiles in Incoherence Award. The winner—by a long mile—is Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard claims to make ending regime-change wars the centerpiece of her Presidential campaign, which would be laudable where it not for the reality that Gabbard inhabits the most horrible piece of turf in American politics—that fever swamp out behind the political barn where the alt-right and alt-left meet to swap crudely simplistic conspiracy theories. Tulsi Gabbard has much more in common with Steve Bannon (he’s a fan) than she does with Bernie Sanders, and she has created a very Trumpian political brand in that it has no coherent strategy or platform beyond her being at the center of everything and in its fundamental weirdness. Gabbard has missed 90 percent of her Congressional votes over the past two months to focus on her Presidential campaign, but despite this investment she can’t get past 2% in the polls. She needlessly caused a bitter breakup with the Democratic Party in her own state of Hawaii, and decided to retire from Congress rather than face a primary opponent. She archly announced her “boycott” of the December Democratic Presidential debate in an attempt to ignore the fact that she didn’t qualify for it. Gabbard is a political personality without a program other than to find some home that will give herself relevancy. This doesn’t play well on the Democratic side, and she hasn’t been able to get her campaign off the floor. She auditioned for a job in Trump administration in its early days. She has been running for President in a party that—for good reason—doesn’t trust her, and next November she won’t have a job. She is a frequent guest on Fox News. (Leading supremacist Tucker Carlson is keen on her.)

Gabbard was coy about her impeachment vote beforehand. On the day on which she would be asked to cast the most important vote of her Congressional career, Gabbard was AWOL. She was nowhere to be seen during the six hours of debate. When the vote was called, Gabbard arrived in the chamber in time to take the floor, hike her skirt, piss all over the Constitution and her Democratic colleagues by voting “Present,” and make a hasty exit.

“I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no. I am standing in the center,” Gabbard said in a typically goofy statement after her non-vote. Anyone who still thinks that time has stood still since 1965 and that the American political center is the spot halfway between the Democratic and Republican Party is certifiably insane and part of the problem, not the solution. Given that she committed political suicide yesterday as a Democrat, Gabbard’s career options are obvious: a job with Fox News, a place on Trump’s team, or a third-party Presidential bid. Trump would be thrilled if she choose the latter option. Gabbard and Trump deserve each other.

“This is nothing but a continuation of an internal political struggle, with the party that lost the election, the Democratic Party, trying to reach its goal by different means,” said Mitch McConnell after the vote. Oh, sorry—it was Vladimir Putin who said that.