There is also an active and increasingly loud impeachment lobby led by the billionaire activist Tom Steyer, a San Francisco businessman who has already spent more than thirty million dollars on a public campaign calling for Congress to remove Trump from office. Since launching in October, his group, Need to Impeach, has acquired close to five million online signatures for its impeachment petition. TV ads feature Steyer looking into the camera, with the White House in the background, recounting a varied litany of complaints about Trump. An early ad said, “Donald Trump has brought us to the brink of nuclear war, obstructed justice, and taken money from foreign governments. We need to impeach this dangerous President.” A more current version reels off the indictments already obtained by Mueller’s investigators and concludes, “No President is above the law.”

When we spoke last week, Steyer seemed almost agnostic about the official reasons Congress should cite for Trump’s impeachment. He told me he was convinced that new and compelling evidence would emerge to bolster the political case for removing the President from office. Steyer said that he felt no need to wait for the results of Mueller’s investigation and was responding to the political reality that it can take a long time, as it did during Watergate, to get the American people to accept the radical step of removing a President from office. “We started this knowing it’s a marathon and not a sprint,” Steyer told me. “And that it has to do with the information reaching the American people so that people understand this is a deeply unfit and dangerous American President.”

But Steyer’s rallying of the Trump-hating party base has put him at odds with Nadler and other Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, who believe it is both premature and politically damaging to call for impeachment now. The House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, a fellow-Californian, called Steyer—a huge party benefactor, who contributed more than sixty million dollars to the Party’s candidates and causes in 2016—to lobby him directly against the impeachment drive, the Times reported. Bernie Sanders has publicly pleaded with Steyer and others to avoid “jumping the gun” and pushing for Trump’s removal before it’s possible to achieve it. Other Democrats, especially the campaign strategists who have to advise the Party’s candidates in the midterm elections, fear that impeachment is a political loser with voters, who will cast ballots on more traditional pocketbook issues.

Steyer is well aware of the criticism. He said he knew that the numbers in Congress, for now, are against him. “How that works out, exactly, I don’t know,” he told me. “But I would also quote Nelson Mandela: ‘Everything is impossible until it happens.’ We are saying something that is incredibly important to the people of the United States. We understand there’s a concern that it does not suit the short-term needs of some elected officials. I understand that they’ve got to try and figure that out.”

Jerry Nadler is still figuring it out. “My view of impeachment is to be very careful about impeachment,” he told me. Since succeeding Conyers in the House Judiciary Committee post, he’s been raising his profile, appearing as a talking head on MSNBC and CNN, attacking Trump, and talking as though the President is a genuine menace to the nation. But that doesn’t mean Nadler is ready to call for impeachment, at least not yet. He considers Steyer’s Need to Impeach campaign “premature at best,” he told me. “I don’t think it’s constructive. We don’t have the evidence now that would be convincing enough to people to justify impeachment.” As a political matter, Nadler added, “I don’t think the election campaign should be fought on the basis of impeachment or no impeachment. We’ve got plenty of problems in the country, and I don’t think it helps the country, never mind the Democrats. We should, though, fight the election on the grounds of whether the President is a good or a terrible President.”

Nadler comes from a safely Democratic district and has never had a competitive race since he first won his seat, in a special election, in 1992. But political calculation dominated our conversations about whether and how the impeachment of Trump could proceed. In Nadler’s reading of history, Nixon was forced from office because Democrats enlisted enough Republicans in the impeachment case to make Nixon’s presumed conviction in the Senate, by a two-thirds majority, likely; then and only then did Nixon step aside. In the Clinton case, conversely, Democrats stuck together and voted en masse against the House impeachment, and Republicans were unable to secure a conviction on the basis of just their own party’s votes in the Senate. Nadler warned of a “partisan coup d’état” against Clinton on the House floor, but, in the end, the political math didn't favor it.

The Clinton impeachment shapes how Nadler views a prospective case against Trump. “I said this on the floor of the House in 1998, and I meant it: impeachment must not be partisan,” Nadler told me. “And that’s true for two reasons. Number one, simple arithmetic. Let’s assume the Democrats get a majority of the House in the election, and let’s assume you vote impeachment on a partisan basis: all the Democrats voted for it; all the Republicans voted against it. Yes, you could impeach the President in the House. But you need a two-thirds vote in the Senate, and what’s the point of it? If you’re going to impeach him, you ought to be pretty sure you can convict him and remove him from office, and you should have good reasons for doing so.”

Removing the President is a dramatic move against the popular will; in effect, Nadler said, “you are nullifying the last election,” which is not something to be undertaken “without having buy-in, at least by the end of the process, by an appreciable fraction” of Republicans as well as Democrats. The alternative? “Twenty or thirty years of recriminations. Of almost half the country saying, ‘We won the election; you stole it from us.’ You don’t want to do that. Which means you should not impeach the President unless you really believe that, by the end of the process, you will have not only Democrats agreeing with you but a good fraction of the people who voted for him.”

There’s also the matter of evidence, and just what the charges would be against Trump. In the Clinton case, Nadler argued that Presidential perjury about a sexual affair did not rise to the level of impropriety envisioned in the Constitution, and he successfully urged Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on just what would constitute an impeachable offense, an exercise that convinced him that “the real test for an impeachable offense is, is this a threat to the constitutional order, to the protection of liberty, to the checks and balances system that the Constitution sets up?” He told me, “The impeachment clause was put into the Constitution as a political tool with which to defend the republic, to defend the constitutional order, to defend against a would-be tyrant.”

Those are strong words, and I found myself wondering whether Nadler really expected the case against Trump to rise someday to the grave standard he was setting for it. Does he think Trump is a tyrant, or that he could become one? Our back-and-forth on the matter left me feeling unclear, though it is certainly conventional wisdom in both parties these days that Democrats, given the House majority, are all but certain to proceed with some kind of case against Trump. (“This impeachment threat is out there,” a Fox News commentator named Liz Peek warned the crowd at last week’s CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives, according to the Washington Post. “It’s a very good reason to go vote, and to give money.”)