When learning about the process of impeaching a president, the first one in any history book was Richard Nixon. The Watergate break in, the Washington Post’s heroics, the tapes, the resignation. It was a story about how Democracy worked, even if it was awfully dramatic.

I always wondered what I would have done as an adult during that time – the summer when every channel showed the hearings and every paper and tv news show in the country covered it. Would I ignore it all and move through the world oblivious, or would I have been hanging on every word?

Reading about the Nixon Impeachment gave it a soap opera sheen. One thing that seemed to be glossed over in the whole thing was the weight of it all. Nobody told us that watching Democracy crumble around your ears would be terrifying. Always, there would be a hero to stand up and do the right thing, and in the end, they would win. Because America Always Wins.

Oh, what a sweet summer child I was.

Now, finally, three years after many people saw there was a criminal going to take over the Oval Office, the House has its ass in gear and is going through with investigating and deciding whether to draft Articles of Impeachment.

Looking at the process through the jaded eyes of adulthood, I wonder how America has actually survived this long. If this is the process by which we have to remove someone’s power to mess up the entire world with their hubris, we’re incredibly lucky to even be around.

Hearings are long and infuriating, often with elected officials grandstanding over the top of a lifelong career public servant. Many Congresspeople are predictable and often, rather dumb. The partisanship would be shocking, if it wasn’t 2019 and we weren’t marinating in crap politics. But still, the details work their way out to the public consciousness.

So, for future reference, if anyone is ever looking up what it was like to exist as a regular citizen during the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump – it’s week two, and it sucks. The president sucks, his staff sucks, the media environment sucks, the lawyers suck, Jim Jordan (R – Standing obliviously outside a locker room), Chris Stewart (R – Somewhere orange, like Trump’s Ass or the desert of Utah), and Devin Nunes (R – FRESNOPE) especially suck, and I hope both the Senate and the House end up working 15 hour days through the New Year to make sure that America actually heads towards being great again. We could start by not screwing over our allies to beat Joe Biden, of all people. The Dem candidate least likely to win the thing.

Basically, World, we’re sorry, it’s all f*cked, but we’re trying to fix it – just in the slowest way possible.