Rep. Al Green introduces his fifth Trump impeachment article

Al Green is now five for five. Five articles of impeachment, five trips to the House floor, and near as anyone can tell, five outcomes that end exactly the same way: nowhere. At some point this stops being a legislative act and starts being a ritual, like clockwork, except instead of chiming on the hour it fires off a press release.

The thing is, impeachment used to mean something heavy. It was the kind of tool you reached for once, maybe twice a generation, because you'd exhausted every other option and the offense demanded it. Green has turned it into a subscription service. Nobody in Washington even blinks anymore when his name pops up next to the word "impeachment," which tells you everything about how much weight it's carrying these days. That's not a Trump problem. That's a Green problem, and by extension a Democratic Party problem, because plenty of their own leadership has quietly winced every time he does this.

There's a real cost to crying wolf five times over. It trains the public to tune out the word entirely, so that if a future president actually does something impeachment-worthy, the reaction will be a shrug instead of alarm. Green may feel righteous introducing these one after another, but he's spending down a currency that belongs to the whole institution, not just to him.

If Democrats want to make a case against Trump on the merits, on policy, on anything with actual traction, this is not how you do it. Symbolic gestures that go nowhere and everyone knows will go nowhere aren't courage. They're theater, and voters can tell the difference.