| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Carl Hulse at the New York Times has a good piece asking if impeaching President Donald Trump will lead to an era in which, as Republicans argued Thursday, the bar is set so low that we can expect the same every time the president and the House majority come from different parties. My first reaction was: of course not. The impeachment of Bill Clinton did that. Yes, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama were impeached. But Democrats had only two years in the House majority with Bush and could well have acted differently with more time. Obama actually sparked a small amount of impeachment talk despite running a remarkably scandal-free presidency. And now we have Trump, who will be impeached within the first year of the Democratic House majority. My second reaction was: well, maybe not. Strong partisans certainly liked the idea of impeaching Bush and Obama, but House Speakers Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner shut them down. Speakers don't do things arbitrarily. They act because their caucuses want them to. This suggests that even publicly pro-impeachment lawmakers in both cases may have been just as happy to be restrained. After all, we're only talking about impeachment, not removal. And impeachment with a relatively certain acquittal has the same drawbacks that made Pelosi reluctant to pursue it with Trump. So my best guess is that we'll hear more impeachment talk in the years ahead, but actually going through with it will remain somewhat rare. My third reaction was: It really doesn't matter much. Impeachment, given how difficult removal will always be, is an inherently weak constitutional power. That it's rarely used is neither here nor there, since in most circumstances it will be little more than a public-opinion gambit. And if it starts happening regularly — if, for example, Democrats wind up actually impeaching Trump a second or third time? What we can expect is that the more often the House, the Senate and the president have to go through with the procedure, the more it will be streamlined to allow governing to continue — the current House, for instance, is already being quite productive despite impeachment. So it probably won't matter too much if impeachment becomes more common. Rules and norms will evolve. 1. Sarah Binder at the Monkey Cage on impeachment going forward. 2. Caitlin Jewitt and Seth Masket at Mischiefs of Faction on party reform. 3. Dan Drezner on why we're hearing fewer examples of Trump's bad behavior. It's not because he's changed. 4. Daniel Cox and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux on millennials and religion. 5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Faye Flam on Greta Thunberg. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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