The moral imperative of impeachment is more clear

“Let’s be serious.”

It was not French President Emmanuel Macron’s purpose to provide a slogan for the impeachment effort against President Trump, which entered a new phase Wednesday with the opening of the House Judiciary Committee hearings.

In offering those explosive words at a news conference with Trump the day before, Macron reminded us it really is a deadly serious business.

The president’s partisans on the Judiciary Committee tried hard to make it otherwise. “This impeachment is not really about the facts,” declared Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, the Trump hardliner who is the ranking Republican on the committee.

But it most certainly is about the facts. There are the facts in the House Intelligence Committee’s comprehensive report released Tuesday. And there are the often-embarrassing events visible for all to see during this week’s NATO summit. Collins’ statement makes sense only for those consciously choosing to avoid the facts — or, worse, to put forward lies, as Republicans do when they weaponize Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s propaganda to claim falsely that Ukraine tried to influence our last election.

The most important charge in the Intelligence Committee’s report is this one: that “the President placed his personal political interests above the national interests of the United States.”

Trump’s other offenses flow from this one. That is especially true of his willingness to press foreign governments to meddle in our elections, as he did with Ukraine’s president, or to issue an open invitation to a foreign government to jump right in. That’s what he did with his “Russia, if you’re listening” comment during the 2016 campaign.

Trump’s narrow, obsessive focus on himself is so widely accepted that it is taken for granted. Thus, the profound threat this poses to our interests as a nation is routinely ignored or downplayed.

The NATO summit is a prime example of how narcissism-as-foreign-policy is compromising our nation’s role in the world and sowing turmoil among our allies. As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted Tuesday, the president had “thrown NATO into a state of chaos, contradicted his own administration on multiple occasions and caused a plunge in the stock market.” Just another day on the job for Trump.

Normally we remove a bad president through elections. But all three law professors called before the Judiciary Committee by the Democrats — Noah Feldman, Pamela Karlan and Michael Gerhardt — cited William Richardson Davie’s 1787 argument for including an impeachment provision in the Constitution by way of underscoring the urgency of acting now.

Davie, Feldman said, “was pointing out that impeachment was necessary to address the situation where a president tried to corrupt elections.” If a president could not be removed, as Davie put it, “he will spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself reelected.”

Republicans have always said they were toughminded and serious about America’s interests. Yet my Post colleague (and former Republican) Max Boot expressed an unvarnished view this week of the path Republicans are now pursuing by going all-in for Trump. “By turning into apologists and advocates for a Russian dictator,” he wrote, “the Republican Party has become all that it once despised.”

Does the party want this to be its epitaph? Is it as unserious about the nation’s interests as Trump is?