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EDITORIAL: Second impeachment push will exacerbate divisions

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plowed ahead Monday with another effort to remove President Donald Trump from office, this time in response to the mob that stormed the Capitol last week in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College results.

Many believe this latest move to impeach Mr. Trump has more gravitas than the political theater that took place in December 2019. That’s when House Democrats culminated a three-year effort to overturn the 2016 election with a symbolic Hail Mary over a phone call Mr. Trump had with the president of Ukraine. But Ms. Pelosi would have much more credibility had she not previously abused impeachment to satisfy her own partisan political vendettas.

What happened in the Capitol is indefensible, and Mr. Trump’s rhetoric was not helpful. But the president has now committed himself to a peaceful transition of power in just eight days. Rushing through another impeachment with minimal chance to be tried in the Senate will only exacerbate tensions across the United States will and detract from President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. It smacks not of equity and unity, but of retribution and division.

Yet Democrats remain intent on securing their pound of flesh.

Politico reported that Ms. Pelosi told members to be back in Washington by Tuesday evening and be prepared to take up the president’s removal first thing Wednesday morning if Mr. Trump fails to resign or Vice President Mike Pence declines to initiate efforts to oust him via the 25th Amendment. Neither of those are likely to occur.

The House vote is pre-ordained. The chamber as of Monday had 218 co-signers on a single article of impeachment accusing Mr. Trump of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.” Unlike the last try, a handful of Republican members may jump on board. The article cites Mr. Trump’s comment to his supporters in the hours before the Capitol rampage that, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Legal experts can debate the difficulties of proving charges of sedition or incitement. Mr. Trump has been faulted for not quickly moving to quell the uprising, but the rhetoric in question seems well within the confines of the First Amendment.

“Because the time frame is so short and the need is so immediate and an emergency, we will also proceed on a parallel path in terms of impeachment,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, told reporters on Monday. “Whether impeachment can pass the United States Senate is not the issue.”

Indeed. The issue — given that we’re just days from a Biden administration — seems defined more by vengeance than by justice. And that’s the last thing the country needs right now.

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