Liberty and law are under attack worldwide. Consider the impeachment crisis in that context.

At first glance, the impeachment proceedings against President Trump might seem to be a specifically and narrowly American matter. But if you look around the world, you see this is taking place amid a deeply worrying global trend. In country after country, we are witnessing an unprecedented wave of attacks on the constitutions, institutions, norms and values that have given democracy strength and meaning.

Consider what has been happening just this week around the world as Congress debated charges against Trump. In India, the world’s largest democracy, the ruling party passed an unprecedented citizenship bill that privileges certain religions over others, namely Islam, a move that has been widely criticized by human rights groups and described by one Indian intellectual as “a giant step to officially convert a constitutional democracy into a[n] unconstitutional ethnocracy.”

This follows on the heels of an initiative by the same Hindu nationalist movement in one Indian state, seemingly aimed at Muslims, that stripped 2 million residents of citizenship on the grounds that they didn’t have sufficient documentary proof — in a country where most people have few written records. The government has begun building prisons in which to incarcerate these dispossessed people.

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