A rock solid party line

We looked into the archives to see how The Times covered similar votes in the last two presidential impeachments. Here was how we described the House approving a resolution in the Nixon impeachment investigation, in 1974:

“The House thus formally ratified the impeachment inquiry begun by the committee last October and empowered the panel to subpoena anyone, including the President, with evidence pertinent to the investigation,” The Times wrote. “ … The vote followed an hour of debate in which no one rose to defend Mr. Nixon, but Democrats and Republicans quarreled over the best method to guarantee that the inquiry, would not become partisan.”

And here was how The Times described the House approving a resolution in the Clinton impeachment investigation, in 1998:

“After a civil if sometimes harshly phrased debate that lasted more than three hours, the House of Representatives voted largely along party lines this afternoon to begin a full-scale, open-ended inquiry,” The Times wrote. “ … the founding fathers, the Constitution and the long shadow of precedent were cited by both sides as the debate unfolded.”

Right after the House voted today, I asked my colleague Carl Hulse, who covered the Clinton impeachment, what his first thought was about this vote compared to the one he covered in 1998. Here’s what he told me:

“The vote today underscored the deep and new kind of polarization in Washington. Back then, 31 Democrats broke with the president, and Bill Clinton was happy about that! He thought it’d be more. Now, no one broke. That’s how much things have changed. If 31 people broke with Mr. Trump, we’d be proclaiming him dead. It would feel like a political apocalypse. Today, it was a rock solid party line.”