Happy Birthday, America. You're not looking so good.

The country is in a bad place this Fourth. To indict a former president would be very bad. To not indict him would probably be worse.

The peaceful transfer of power is not unique to the USA, but the consistency and longevity of this democratic tradition here is exceptional. One of the reasons it has worked is because our presidents don't fear that if they leave power they will be persecuted, jailed, dispossessed, or killed by the incoming administration. An indictment of 45 will erode that sense of security, and to that extent will undermine the peaceful transfer tradition. But the fact is that tradition has already ended in an important sense. Power was transferred in the end, but no president before has come anywhere close to Trump's attempt to cling to power by fraud, deception, criminal subversion, and incitement of violence. To not indict him now is to normalize those abuses, to tempt future losers to try the same things, and to lead voters to expect no holds barred political warfare from their candidates. Whatever else you want from our politics, you ought to want the peaceful transfer of power, because it's hard to imagine anything much good without it. And it happens to be the American way.

The dilemma we are in highlights the wisdom of those senators, including several (but not enough) Republicans, who voted for impeachment. And it highlights the cowardice of McConnell who did not and instead placed a fool's hope in criminal proceedings. Impeachment was the right way to deal with this. Impeachment was clearly made for precisely such a situation, as it entails merely the narrow political punishment of removal from office. Indictment and criminal conviction is a distant second best scenario that risks a lot.

Happy birthday America. You're not looking so good.

-Jake Greear