Vociferous Republican defenders of President Trump throughout his potential impeachment ought to remember the fate of Charles Sandman.

Sandman, a Republican congressman from New Jersey, was perhaps the single most vociferous defender of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate hearings. As described by the New York Times — and as I remember it, too, remarkably vividly, from my childhood — Sandman’s “strategy was to construe the evidence as narrowly as possible, require ironclad proof and propose benign explanations of information damaging to the President.”