The impeachment process against Donald J. Trump began in the early morning hours of Nov. 9, when it became clear that the Republican standard bearer had carried the state of Pennsylvania and therefore the Electoral College.

The first avenue for impeachment was collusion with the Russians. Maxine Waters suggested that coming up with the nickname “Crooked Hillary” was enough to get him impeached. However, none of them had the brilliant strategy that Rep. Al Green of Texas cooked up: why actually require a crime for impeachment?

On Wednesday, Green introduced articles of impeachment against President Trump in the House of Representatives. Trump stood accused of… nothing. There was no crime mentioned in the articles of impeachment. In fact, that wasn’t just a bug in the plan, it was a feature.

Suffice it to say, it didn’t go so well. Even among Democrats.

According to The Daily Caller, the articles of impeachment were tabled — a polite, Robert’s Rules of Order way of saying “we have no intention of spending any of our time on this crap” — by a vote of 364-58.

Putting that in perspective, there are 193 Democrats at present serving in the House of Representatives.

That means that — desperate to get Donald J. Trump out of office though they may be — 135 Democrats voted against impeachment vs. 58 that voted for it. The GOP, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t break ranks on this one. Even Justin Amash.

In other words, more Democrats voted for Trump to stay in office than to leave.

Part of the problem was that there wasn’t actually any reason why Trump should have been impeached. That’s not me talking here, that’s Rep. Al Green.

“A common misconception associated with impeachment proceedings is that an impeachable offense must be explicitly illegal. This is not the case,” Green wrote in a memo.

“The impeachment process is political in nature, not criminal. As laid out in Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution, grounds for impeachment include ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ Upon first glance, this might seem to imply both felony offenses and less severe misdemeanor offenses. However, this is not the case.

“The framers of the U.S. Constitution, drawing on impeachment grounds in the English parliament established in 1386, adopted ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors‘ as a term of art meant to describe a variety of offenses sharing an underlying abuse which demonstrated an official’s lack of fitness for office. Today, most constitutional law experts recognize that an impeachable offense does not need to be a crime.”

In other words, the reason why we can impeach someone without them committing a crime is because back in 1386, the pasty royalists we expended plenty of blood and bullets to get them the heck off of our continent came up with “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” not as a description of crime but “as a term of art meant to describe a variety of offenses sharing an underlying abuse which demonstrated an official’s lack of fitness for office.” This comes dangerously close to interpreting Article 2 as a pretext for a coup.

However, I’ve read through the entirety of Green’s articles so that you don’t have to (although if you dislike yourself enough, they’re only five pages long and a masterpiece of self-delusion). And thankfully, we’re not in any danger of seeing our democracy dismantled.

The “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” don’t include instances of archaic random capitalization, but do include the fact that he “issued a public statement characterizing anti-Semites, bigots, racists, white nationalists, and Ku Klux Klansmen who rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia as ‘very fine people,’” “made a public statement referring to professional football players as ‘sons of b*****,’ therefore denigrating them and their mothers (emphasis mine) for exercising their constitutionally protected right to protest,” “made a public statement that after being devastated by a Category 4 and Category 5 hurricane in one week, Puerto Ricans had ‘…thrown our budget a little out of whack’” and — the pièce de résistance — “issued a public statement referring to Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL-24), a female, African-American Member of Congress as ‘wacky’ and called her a liar.”

I was all for keeping him in office, but then I found out he called Frederica Wilson “wacky.” That, my friends, is where we all as Americans must draw the line. And those poor NFL players’ mothers. Have you at long last no decency, President Trump?

By the way, everything I just mentioned is B.S. Trump didn’t refer to the “anti-Semites, bigots, racists, white nationalists, and Ku Klux Klansmen” in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” he was referring to the small number of protesters who showed up thinking it was about the preservation of the Lee statue and instead got lost in a mob of race hatred led by the despicable Daily Stormer types. The president was not denigrating the players or (I can’t believe I’m actually typing this out) their mothers, he was expressing his frustration with those who chose to denigrate the anthem as a form of protest. His comment about Puerto Rico was an obvious joke, and anybody who takes it as anything else is doing so deliberately in order to score political capital.

Actually, I was incorrect; one of Green’s charges is accurate. Frederica Wilson is “wacky” and a liar. The more politicians that acknowledge this, the better.

None of these things are high crimes. None of these things are misdemeanors. And most Democrats are well aware of that. The 58 that aren’t… well, maybe we should just say you won’t be surprised.

Rep. Ted Lieu, who walked out during a moment of silence for the Texas massacre victims and began livestreaming, voted to impeach. So did Maxine Waters, whose history needs no explication in these pages. Frederica Wilson also definitively proved her wackiness by joining the impeachment crowd.

In the meanwhile, it seems that even the Democrats have some semblance of propriety. Or, they got the message from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, who strongly opposed the articles and told their Democratic colleagues to stop pushing them or face consequences. One or the other.

Please like and share this story on Facebook and Twitter if you agree this impeachment attempt was a ridiculous charade.