| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. A few notes on what would have been a quiet period in a normal U.S. political calendar: - The impeachment vote scheduled in the House of Representatives for Wednesday will probably be the closest to a bipartisan one ever. No Democrats voted to impeach President Andrew Johnson in 1868 and no Republicans voted for the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in 2019. Five Democrats voted for three of the four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton in 1998, including both of the articles that passed the House. It seems likely that more than five Republicans will join every House Democrat this time. Note that by all accounts, the vast majority of House Republicans would have voted to impeach President Richard Nixon in 1974.
- I don't understand why House Democrats took a detour through the 25th Amendment on their way to impeachment, voting on Tuesday to to ask Vice President Mike Pence to remove Trump's powers in a party-line vote, with one Republican joining every Democrat. I can think of three possible reasons: They think it's right on the merits; they think it's good politics; or they did it because some swing votes requested it. The last one is, if true, an excellent reason. The other two seem wrongheaded to me.
- Last year, I speculated that a handful of Republican senators might vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, and that it was possible but unlikely that the majority would turn against him, but that the party's Senate delegation would not be closely divided. In other words, he'd either be removed by a comfortable margin or survive by a comfortable margin. I guess I would stick with the same set of predictions this time around. But I also would have predicted that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would vote with the winning side, and from what was reported Tuesday, it appears that he might be one of the Republicans more likely to vote to convict regardless of what other Republicans do. Perhaps McConnell will wind up voting "no" along with most Republicans after all; perhaps he knows that 20 or more Republicans intend to vote "yes." I guess we'll see.
- How likely is Trump to resign? I have no idea. He acts on impulse, not political incentives, so it's hard to know. It is worth reminding everyone that when Republican leaders went to the White House in August 1974, before Nixon resigned, they were able to tell him that impeachment and removal were certain, with Nixon down to fewer than 20 supporters in the Senate, and perhaps fewer than 10. They could also hope to persuade Nixon not to put the nation — and the party — through more torment, especially with midterm elections coming. It's unlikely that Republican leaders in Congress now believe that Trump cares about either the nation or the party.
- We still have little sense of how the Senate will handle an impeachment trial. McConnell is still majority leader, and will be until Kamala Harris becomes vice president on Jan. 20 and until the two new Democratic senators from Georgia take office at some point over the next 10 days. It still seems unlikely that the Senate will do much before that. Afterward, the Democrats and incoming Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will have to figure out how to balance impeachment proceedings with votes they want to take on cabinet confirmations and high-priority legislation.
- I'll close with one hopeful and one scary thought. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson, seeing Republicans turning against Trump Tuesday afternoon, said on Twitter that "This feels like it might — might — be the first time in more than a decade that significant numbers of GOPers turn *away* from extremism instead of *toward* it. Might." On the other hand, political scientist Dan Drezner published a Washington Post column Tuesday evening in which he wondered whether the Republican Party was turning into Hezbollah. Both of them sound plausible to me.
1. Alexander C. Furnas and Timothy M. LaPira at the Monkey Cage on Republican elites who say they believe false stories about the presidential election. 2. Matthew Green at Mischiefs of Faction on the House Freedom Caucus and sedition. 3. Jackson Gode and Molly E. Reynolds on proxy voting in the House. 4. Lauren Haumesser on McConnell and Stephen A. Douglas. 5. Adam Serwer on last week's Capitol rioters. 6. Nathan L. Gonzales looks back at the 2020 elections. 7. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen on Democrats and the economy. 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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