DUBUQUE, Iowa — It was a day like many across the divided states of America, brimming with anger, resentment and festering grudges.
For just the fourth time in history, the House of Representatives — the people’s house — began formally weighing impeachment of a president..
Impeachment, the first step in ousting a president, is a political sanction — and provocation — like no other. In a country already blazing with animosities, the mere prospect was like adding matches and several buckets of gasoline.
The facts — a Trump phone call seeking “a favor” from Ukraine’s leader, a president reaching overseas to excavate dirt on Democratic rival Joe Biden, foreign aid possibly held up as leverage — were fuzzy to most. Indeed, in dozens of interviews from Winooski, Vt., to Southern California, the Democratic move on Capitol Hill seemed not to change very many minds; opinions were formed a long time ago.
For those opposed to the president, the effort to impeach was a long-awaited and much-belated reckoning.
“I feel like we all knew this is what happened with Russia,” Alex Worthy said of interference that helped cost Democrat Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, “and we couldn’t get the evidence and now have it.”
The 28-year-old Democrat, a Laguna Hills, Calif., attorney, was rooting for impeachment even before the Ukraine scandal broke.