Jamil Smith, in Rolling Stone:
Think about what happened here, about what is described in that report. The country’s elections were attacked by a foreign power. Russia is a vote suppressor. Understanding that, what motivation would this President have to move a finger to stop them? Or the Republican Party, for that matter? The only hope for accountability, perhaps before a court of law after Trump is no longer President, is the Democratic Party that has the power to start impeachment proceedings.
Should Democrats take impeachment off the table, they would let Trump get away with it. It is that elementary. There is no guarantee that he will not repeat the very same encouragement of those Russian efforts, all the while playing dumb so as to avoid legal culpability.
If Democrats were smarter, they would understand that initiating the impeachment of Trump might actually galvanize their base because it would demonstrate that leadership was willing to take the obvious, the logical and the constitutional step once presented with such an abundance of evidence. They would grasp that the visual of their party standing up to a president wedded equally to corruption and to his assortment of bigotries would be appealing to an electorate where black voters are increasingly driving the conversation. Democrats would seize upon the Mueller Report as a flashpoint for organization and recruitment, rather than take the task of prosecution that the Constitution assigned to Congress, hand it off to voters and call that “democracy.”…