Either Mueller’s findings or the Ukraine “drug deal,” as Bolton reportedly called it, would merit impeachment on its own. But the urgency of Democrats’ impeachment process — the subject of much bad-faith caterwauling on the right — is best justified by Trump’s recidivism. Impeachment isn’t just about holding Trump accountable for a discrete scandal. It’s about trying, against the odds, to stop an ongoing campaign to subvert the 2020 election, one that is building on tactics from 2016.

Indeed, even as the Judiciary Committee discussed impeachment, Giuliani was in Ukraine seeking meetings with corrupt former prosecutors who, he apparently hoped, would undercut the Democrats’ case. A day before that, Giuliani had been in Budapest where he met with another disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, as well as with Andrii V. Artemenko, a pro-Russian former member of Ukraine’s Parliament.

Artemenko’s name might be familiar to those who’ve followed Trump’s Russia scandal closely. He was the one who reportedly gave Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, a Russia-friendly “peace plan” for Russia and Ukraine, which Cohen transmitted to Michael Flynn, then Trump’s national security adviser. Artemenko, The New York Times reported in 2017, “sees himself as a Trump-style leader of a future Ukraine.” He’d claimed to have evidence of corruption by Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western figure he was trying to oust. “Mr. Artemenko said he had received encouragement for his plans from top aides” to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, The Times said.

To understand the sociopathic shamelessness of Giuliani seeking Artemenko’s help with Trump’s current domestic political problems, you have to understand how the Russia scandal and the Ukraine scandal intersect.

Given America’s political polarization, public opinion on impeachment is unlikely to move much no matter what Democrats do. Nevertheless, they’d be mad to let centrist trepidation stop them from making the strongest possible case for Trump’s removal. Doing that requires a willingness to put Trump’s Ukraine corruption in context.

Democrats have only one chance to impeach the most corrupt and disloyal president in American history. They say they’re rushing through it because it can’t wait. They have a duty to explain not just why Trump betrayed America when he sought to extort election help from Ukraine, but how we know that he’ll nearly certainly try the same thing again.