President Donald Trump was acquitted of impeachment charges on Wednesday. After Republican senators voted not to hear from a single witness the first time thats happened in the impeachment trial of a U.S. president, of which there have now been three it was clear to everyone that acquittal was guaranteed. But really it was guaranteed all along.

The Trump administration engaged in unprecedented obstruction of Congress. The brazen nature of that cover-up was made possible by the extreme polarization of our political system, which has rendered parts of our Constitution essentially unusable. And the Republican Party has shown it will take full advantage of that dysfunction in order to protect its president and maintain power as its base of support shrinks. The result is a presidency that quite literally can do no wrong. The conservative movement has finally destroyed the myth, rooted in the Watergate era, that the system can work to remove a corrupt president. And it has done so thanks to decades worth of efforts to loosen the reins placed on the executive branch.