Mueller’s presentation may have been underwhelming, but he allowed Democrats to put a bow around his findings, clearing away some of the deliberate confusion created by Attorney General William Barr’s misleading summary. “The press focused on the performance and the optics instead of on the substance,” said Jerry Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “Mueller said we were attacked by the Russians, the Trump campaign cooperated in many ways with that attack, they welcomed it, in many ways they worked with it.”

Democrats already knew all this, of course. But just as Trump’s recent racist outbursts forced renewed attention to his bigotry, Mueller made Congress squarely confront the president’s lawlessness and disloyalty to the country he purports to lead. Once he testified, congressional Democrats could no longer punt on the impeachment question by saying that they were waiting to hear from him.

And even if Mueller’s appearance didn’t change many minds, it galvanized some voters. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat, told me that in recent days, “The constituent calls that I have been getting have just increased, both in number and intensity, saying: ‘Enough is enough. It’s time for him to go.’” On Monday, she came out for beginning an impeachment inquiry.

Perhaps even more significant than the growing number of calls for impeachment is a lawsuit filed by the Judiciary Committee on Friday. The filing, demanding access to grand jury material from the Mueller investigation, says that the committee “is conducting an investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment.” In other words, the Judiciary Committee, which would oversee any potential impeachment, announced, with surprisingly little fanfare, that an impeachment inquiry is already underway.

For months now, there’s been an acrimonious intra-Democratic debate about whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should call a vote to begin such an inquiry. Now, however, the Judiciary Committee is asserting that such a vote isn’t required, and as Nadler points out, Pelosi has signed off on the strategy. The House would have to vote on impeachment itself, but that would come only after the Judiciary Committee has done much of its work.