Maybe there will come a moment when we need political pundits to explain what we just saw. But the first day of public impeachment hearings wasn’t that moment. It was a clear, devastating, uncontested story of a corrupt president doing corruption. Which brings us to a question from The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein: Just How Far Will Republicans Go for Trump? “The larger question the hearings may raise, then, is whether the partisan divide has widened to the point where Republican voters and elected officials alike will not consider valid any process controlled by Democrats, no matter how powerful the evidence it produces. If that’s the case, it points toward a future in which partisan loyalties eclipse, to a growing extent, any shared national commitment to applying the rule of law across party lines. Even given the decades-long rise in political polarization, such a rejection of common standards would constitute an ominous threshold for the nation to cross.” (We’ve been blowing past ominous thresholds nonstop for three years…)

+ “It didn’t take long for the crazy to start.” The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser on the G.O.P. Plan to Keep Impeachment Partisan.

+ Here’s the latest from the impeach pit from WaPo and CNN.