Let's address two things here. The word, and the topic of impeachment.
On the word, that blessed word, sanctified by Saint George of the Seven Words, there are several types of people claiming outrage: those whose outrage is disingenuous, fools, and the Venn diagram overlap. The overlap is significant. To those in any category, shut the fuck up. Shut up and go away. The adults are trying to have a fuckin' conversation here.
I hate pearl-clutchers. I hate people who claim phony, bullshit outrage over phony, bullshit pettiness.
Now, on to impeachment. Or rather, not impeachment, because as I have said repeatedly, it won't happen. I have no problem with Tlaib's diction. As for whether or not Trump has committed impeachable offenses, there are clear cases, in my opinion, for emoluments, obstruction of justice, and the hush money payments to women during the campaign. That's the easy stuff, and that's what's public. There's almost certainly more. But it won't happen. And a failed impeachment would just backfire, rallying Trump's supporters and guaranteeing his reelection in 2020. I'm a proud Carlinist, and I take a back seat to nobody in my Trump hatred, but Tlaib's plan is foolish.
This is, essentially, the dilemma of the one good cop in the corrupt town. Let's say you've got the mob boss dead to rights. Everything you need to convict him. As long as the system isn't corrupt... But, you know he's got the whole legal system wrapped around his finger. Do you try to work through the legal system, knowing that the corrupt system will just acquit him because he's bought off everyone? Remember that double jeopardy rule. If the whole fuckin' system is corrupt, is there a point to thinking about it as a prosecutorial matter? Not really. The system is just fucked.
So, what do you do? One answer is vigilantism, but a) that makes you a criminal too, and b) that's not very creative. Fun for action movies and shows, but not particularly creative, plot-wise. Not recommended in the real world.
Remember when Trump compared Manafort to Capone, and acted like that was exculpatory? For Manafort? Yeah, we know Trump is both corrupt and stupid. The Feds got Capone for tax evasion. Hit him where it counts. The moneybags. What do the Feds to do terrorists and terrorist sympathizers whom they can't catch and prosecute? They freeze their assets through the banking system, just as an example. The fact that you can't prosecute them doesn't mean you can't hit them, and it doesn't mean you have to go criminal yourself.
Of course, the dilemma of the one good cop in the bad town is somewhat different. Freezing assets requires institutional support, but my basic point is that if prosecution isn't an option because that path has been closed off by corruption, there are other paths, and not all of them turn the one-good-cop into a criminal-vigilante-type. The fun alternative plots involve pitting one mob boss against another, selling out criminal A to criminal B, and so forth. You look at what the real options are, and do what you have to do to hit the bad guys in a way that will work. Just because they have bought off the legal system doesn't mean that a) they win or that b) you have to become them to beat them.
But hey, you've seen these movies and shows, right?
So here's the deal. Trump didn't bribe the Senate. He didn't need to. The analogy I have been making for about two years now is that he has an electoral bomb strapped to him. There's a dead-man trigger on it, and the whole Republican Party is chained to him. If his political life ends, the whole GOP goes down with him. If the country, as a country, recognizes that Trump is the astonishingly corrupt shitbag that he is, it's 1974 and 1976 all over again. The GOP suffers major electoral losses. However, if the entire GOP, as a party, circles the wagons around Trump, denies any accusation, and pretends that he is the greatest person in the history of humanity, and the greatest person who will ever live, then political norms require a lot of people to pretend that any given accusation, regardless of evidence, is at least questionable. If Trump says 2+2=5, just to pull a non-random, fake equation out of the aether, mathematics textbooks will be rewritten because the GOP cannot abide dissent from anything Trump says, even though he is as stupid and dishonest as any public figure ever. Yeah, fuck Texas and their bullshit textbook games. (And generally, fuck Texas because of the Texas-sized chip on the shoulders of every fucking Texan.) Once they stop circling the wagons, and the public accepts the evidence, the party goes down with Trump.
He doesn't need to bribe anyone. It's in their self-interest, in terms of short-run electoral calculations. Long-run stability of the country and any democratic principles? They don't give a shit. They just don't. And anyone who ever speaks up (hi, Mitt!) will be beaten into submission before they can do any real damage to that wagon circle. Enjoy your beat-down, Mitt! I won't shed a tear for you, motherfucker!
And that brings us to the Senate. You need a 2/3 supermajority to convict. The Republicans have a majority, not the Democrats. Imagine that cop. Let's imagine that you needed a 2/3 supermajority to convict among the jury, not even unanimity. So, that's eight out of twelve. But, the mob boss, let's call him Tiny Hands Donny, has bought off seven out of twelve jurors. You've got a max of five votes, and you need eight. How do you know this before you press charges and hence before jury selection? Don't ask. I'm not a fiction writer, and that's a big plot hole here. Fuck off. Just go with it. If you know the mob boss will successfully buy off seven out of twelve jurors... why bother?
There isn't the slightest chance in hell of impeachment working. None. Zero. I'm not even going to call it epsilon. Zero. Absolute, mathematical zero. It is an impossibility in the same way that when you disprove something in Euclidean geometry, you have shown an impossibility. Kenneth Arrow's "impossibility theorem," in political science and economics, is an actual impossibility. Successful removal of Trump by impeachment is not, "unlikely." It is "impossible."
What can be done? Not a whole lot. America is pretty much fucked. He can be goaded, and embarrassed, though. He got goaded into a stupid shutdown by having some conservative media personalities call him a pussy. How does this end? As I wrote yesterday, I think the likely end of this particular shutdown is that he declares a fake national emergency, and illegally uses federal money appropriated to other projects for his stupid wall, leading to legal challenges.
The point, though, is that he can be goaded into doing stupid, self-destructive things because he is, as I have called him regularly, "the dumbest motherfucker in the history of politics." There are more shutdowns coming. What will he do? I dunno. There is more crazy shit coming. Why? He's stupid and reckless. Goad him.
Where this gets interesting is that the more stupid and reckless he gets, he can actually do damage to the economy. And for 2020, that's all that really matters. Is that ethical?
I dunno. Politics ain't beanbag, as the old saying goes.