It’s not an easy question. Many Democrats who came to support impeachment because of the Ukraine matter did not support an impeachment inquiry based on the Mueller findings alone. This ambivalence reflects public opinion, which shifted hard in favor of an impeachment inquiry only as the Ukraine scandal broke. Politically cautious Democrats might therefore be leery of impeachment mission creep. While they signed up for an impeachment inquiry based on the national-security matters involving Ukraine, they might argue, they never signed up for one based on the misconduct described by Mueller. The president and the attorney general may have succeeded in convincing some of their constituents that this misconduct did not constitute criminal activity. The temptation to proceed based on Schiff’s findings alone will be significant, and it’s not clear at this stage that the votes to include Mueller’s findings are there, at least not on the House floor.

On the other hand, to draft articles of impeachment that leave out the president’s apparent criminality as described in Volume II of the Mueller report would ignore a very large elephant sitting in the House chamber. Volume II, which concerns Donald Trump’s efforts to hamstring the Mueller investigation and turn the Justice Department into a weapon with which to bludgeon his political opponents, contains an abundance of conduct that could have been drawn straight from the articles of impeachment prepared against Richard Nixon. Impeachment, of course, is a political process shaped in part by pragmatic considerations, but the House’s choice of what presidential behavior to include in articles of impeachment is also a judgment as to what behavior is sufficient to merit impeachment in the first place. Does the House Judiciary Committee really want to send the message that obstruction of justice by the president is, on some level, okay?

This would be particularly striking because, in dealing with Ukraine, the House will likely be impeaching Trump for—among other things—conduct he engaged in also with respect to Russia. Consider, for example, that Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which sits at the center of the impeachment process, took place the morning after Mueller testified before Congress about the results of his investigation.

When impeaching Trump for trying to gin up politically motivated investigations by Ukrainian law enforcement of Joe Biden, is the House really going to ignore that Trump repeatedly did the same to Hillary Clinton using American law enforcement? In impeaching him for obstructing congressional efforts to investigate the Ukraine matter, is the House really going to ignore his precisely parallel efforts to obstruct its efforts to investigate Mueller’s findings? To the extent it regards Trump’s efforts to intimidate witnesses as impeachable with respect to Ukraine, is it going to turn its eyes from the fact that the Mueller report is replete with accounts of similar behavior?