In a trenchant essay for The Atlantic, the always-perceptive Adam Serwer explains that, if the Constitution is worth the paper it was printed on, Democrats have no choice but to impeach this president, because he has committed the very offense that the Founding Fathers designed impeachment to remedy.

In fairness to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the events that moved her to support impeachment after months of dismissing the left wing of her caucus are exactly what the Framers had in mind when they crafted the impeachment clause, which was to prevent a corrupt chief executive from using his official powers to keep himself in office. That precisely describes Trump’s use of his official powers to strong-arm a foreign government into implicating his political rivals. The Framers forced the chief executive to face election every four years in order to prevent the president from becoming a king, but they recognized that a corrupt president might use his powers to keep himself in office in perpetuity, and that impeachment was needed as a last resort. Yet Trump is only the most vulgar expression of the anti-democratic streak spreading in the Republican Party, and the forces that propelled his candidacy are the same ones that may shield him from accountability.

Trump tried to use extortion as a tool to maintain his own grip on power and secure his re-election in 2020. The fact that he leveraged American taxpayer funds to harm the candidate of the opposing party whom he thought he was most likely to face simply cements the seriousness of the offense. As that opposing candidate—no matter who it was—would certainly have the support of roughly half of the American electorate, Trump’s offense also amounts to an attempt to disenfranchise American voters. As Serwer wryly notes, the fact that it took an attack against one of their own to finally make certain Democrats in Congress aware of this is regrettable.

Millions of Americans wake up every day worried that Donald Trump’s actions will hurt someone they love, but until he used his authority to go after someone beloved by the Democratic establishment, party leaders didn’t quite grasp the urgency. If Trump could do this to Joe Biden, after all, he could do it to any of them. That’s often how it works in a democracy: People do the right thing for self-interested reasons.

At least they now seem to have shaken off their Stockholm syndrome complacency and are cognizant of the danger this administration represents. Democrats—and all of the country, for that matter—now have a clear picture of how Trump will campaign in 2020. As Serwer observes, it will be by and through his abuses of power, with the full support of a corrupt Department of Justice, and in an echo chamber of endlessly regurgitated right-wing lies from Fox News and its collaborators. Also, and importantly, Republican officeholders in both the House and Senate can be counted on to willfully turn their backs on the rule of law—the key principle of any government “of, for and by the people”—and hitch their wagons instead to Donald Trump, no matter what he does or says.

It is the sense of this overwhelming betrayal and repudiation of our democracy—not only by Trump, but by the Republicans defending him at this very moment—that Serwer believes is an inflection point in how Democrats have come to view this menace.

This is one reason that perceptions among Democrats shifted so fast. In a republic, the people are sovereign. The president used his authority to criminalize or suppress his political rivals, in violation of the people’s right to choose their leadership. His acts exemplify the scenario the Framers feared when they contemplated a corrupt president using executive power to keep himself in office, unaccountable to the people who elected him. Trump’s conduct here is not just impeachable; it is why the impeachment clause exists.

Trump has made his autocratic impulses clear from the start of his administration. What has come, rightly or wrongly, as something of a shock is the eager willingness of an entire political party to abandon any pretense of democratic principles in order to follow his example. Trump’s actions have repeatedly shown that he does not believe that his own interests are separate or distinct from those of the American people. Republicans in Congress and their mouthpieces in the media have adopted this same overarching mindset. If Trump’s actions do not deter the adoration and worshipfulness of his base, then they cannot be wrong, even though Republicans would instantly excoriate a Democratic president for the same behavior.

That is a fundamentally antidemocratic attitude in itself, but behind it, Serwer observes, there is a far more sinister belief system at work.

As the parties have become more racially polarized, and the Republican Party has become more exclusively white and Christian, Republicans have begun to think of themselves as the only genuinely legitimate actors in the polity. This is why Republicans draw districts that hand them more offices even when they fail to win a majority of the votes; it is why Republican legislatures strip Democratic executives of their powers when the electorate foils their efforts to rig elections in their favor; it is why the Trump administration attempted a fraudulent scheme to use the census to diminish the influence of minority voters relative to white voters; it is why Republicans seek to pass laws intended to suppress minority votes; it is why every night on Fox News, viewers hear one host after another outline deranged conspiracies about how Democrats want to steal America from its rightful white owners through demographic change.

Because their entire political philosophy is rooted in virulent, exclusionary racism, the Republican Party considers all Democratic opposition illegitimate, and therefore any action, no matter how corrupt, illegal, unethical, or immoral is justified—as long as it is an action against Democrats. This philosophy, long unacknowledged by Republicans, found new roots in birtherism, which Trump himself used against former President Barack Obama, and can be seen in the reflexive assertions of “voter fraud” that are blamed for Republican electoral losses and used to justify voter suppression. It is echoed in the blanket slandering of any negative news about Republicans (or Trump) as “fake news.”

Serwer notes that, while the peaceful transition of power in a democracy depends on each party respecting the others’ legitimacy, that concept, for many Republicans, is now a nonstarter. They aren’t interested in democracy or the rule of law, only in raw power. This is why Trump’s own corruption does not matter to Republicans, and won’t matter, regardless of what his crimes turn out to be.

Attempting to use one’s official powers for private gain is the most basic definition of corruption. Yet because the base of the Republican Party believes itself to be the only legitimate expression of popular will, whether or not its members constitute an actual majority of the electorate, it does not matter what Trump’s motives are. Much of the Republican base believes, as Trump does, that loyalty to the country and loyalty to himself are one and the same. Therefore, nothing Trump could do is corrupt, and even using his official powers for personal gain is an act of selfless patriotism. In this warped view, attempting to extort foreign countries into attacking his political rivals is not a betrayal of his responsibilities as president; it is the fullest expression of them.

Faced with this utterly warped, monstrous perversion of democracy, Democrats really have no choice but to impeach. It’s either impeach, using the only remedy against this cancer that the Founders provided, or let democracy die the slow death that so many Republicans obviously want for it.