The Mechanism For Removing Trump And His Enablers is the Ballot Box
By 
Will the Mueller investigation result in Trump being impeached by a Republican House? Of course not. Would it lead to him being convicted by a Senate supermajority if he was impeached by a Democratic House? Nah. But that doesn’t mean the scandals don’t matter. They matter because they make Republican defeat more likely:
Despite that, these (or any further) developments are unlikely to break the lockstep Republican support for Trump in Congress and put him into the untenable position faced by Richard Nixon in Watergate. To paraphrase the late Lou Reed, these are different times.
Trump replicating Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre by firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (and as many other officials at the Department of Justice as necessary until he can find one who will relive Robert Mueller of his responsibilities) won’t be enough for Republicans, that’s clear. It’s quite possible that Trump will take those actions: He tried to fire Mueller in December, reports are already surfacing that he’s weighing the possibility of firing Rosenstein as a warning shot to Mueller and the number of people in the White House willing or able to talk Trump off the ledge is dwindling.
But Republicans could have already prevented Trump from stopping the investigation but didn’t — and still could, but won’t. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that he will not consider prophylactic legislation that would protect Mueller from being fired, making his claims that Mueller should “be allowed to finish his job” empty words. If they’re not willing to stop Trump from firing Mueller before the fact, they’re certainly not going to act after the damage has been done.
Impeachment, too, is a complete non-starter regardless of what Trump does, as long as Republicans control the House. Nixon’s forced resignation was the product of a different period in American history, one in which party coalitions were much more heterogenous and presidents could obtain policy successes by getting bipartisan compromises passed by Congress. The members of the party didn’t vote in lockstep, and didn’t vote in lockstep with the president. Those days are gone.
And even if Democrats take over the House after the 2018 midterms, impeachment would be on the table, but Trump’s conviction and removal from office would likely not be. Convicting an impeached president requires a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate, and 2018 would be an exceptionally good year for Democrats if they ended up with even a one-seat majority in the upper chamber.
Does this mean that nothing matters? Absolutely not. The various Trump scandals matter in that they’ve helped to make Donald Trump extraordinarily unpopular for a president presiding over a good economy. The less popular Trump is, the bigger anchor he becomes for congressional Republicans — who will look worse and worse for doing nothing about Trump’s misconduct.
Even if Democrats take the House, focusing on impeachment — which has no chance of resulting in Trump being removed from office and will mobilize Republicans — would be misplaced. The House instead should focus on conducting many investigations that will reveal the malfeasances of Trump and his associates to the public.
Nixon’s forced resignation was the product of a partisan environment that is deader than Everett Dirksen. Republicans won’t remove Trump for the same reason that Trump has governed as a more-orthodox-than-Reagan Reagan Republican. To focus on whether these scandals will lead to Trump’s removal by Congress is the wrong question. The question is how they matter for November 2018 and 2020.