Impeachment Eve open thread

By this time tomorrow, we'll be knee-deep in the first public impeachment hearings.

The road to tomorrow has been bumpy, and not without cracks in the road. Democrats have been faulted for moving too slowly. Surely, Donald Trump's malfeasance was manifest; just get on with it!

However, that's not how things work. In the tried and true old saw: It's a process.

Politics are equal parts skill and luck. Under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrats began methodically laying out accountability for the regime. But then came the luck of the whistleblower and the Ukraine extortion call. Both the laying of the groundwork and the fortuitousness of Trump finally doing something so gobsmackingly stupid that it engendered a whistleblower complaint have equal roles in getting us to where we are.

Again, don't be to confident that this will lead to Trump's ouster, at least by conviction in the Senate. But if there's one thing that we can take away from the past three years, it's this: Expect the unexpected. Nothing we've gone through since 2016 has been business as usual. We're kicking over a hornet's nest; we'd be foolish to predetermine the outcome, save that many people will be stung.

Hang in, patriots. The time is now.