At the start of this administration, many who are horrified by Trump, me included, thought that at some point the Republican fever might break, leading conservatives in Congress to check a dictator-worshiping buffoon for the sake of the Constitution they claim to revere. I’ve become ashamed of my naïveté in imagining any overlap between my ideas about what is valuable in this country, and theirs.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the 63 million people who voted for Mr. Trump,” the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said in his surprisingly moving speech on Wednesday. “Little talk about the 65 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton.” With the House’s impeachment vote, the America outside of Trump’s ruling faction finally mattered.

I don’t mean that impeachment was revenge on a minority president made possible only by a brute majority in one chamber of Congress. Before the Ukraine scandal broke, I had harangued leading Democrats to impeach Trump for obstructing the Mueller investigation, for his flagrant violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, and for cheating in his 2016 election by committing campaign finance crimes, and I’d been repeatedly frustrated by their extreme reluctance. Democrats didn’t want to impeach, but once they decided to, Trump’s insistence that his Electoral College victory grants him impunity didn’t work. For one night, democracy asserted itself.

Much has been made of the fact that the articles of impeachment received no Republican votes; the one conservative who backed them, the former Freedom Caucus member Justin Amash, left the party to become an independent. But there are hardly any moderate Republicans left who might have been open to impeachment because voters in 2018 replaced most of them with Democrats. In the end, Trump’s impeachment passed with more House votes than Bill Clinton’s. All but one of the Democrats first elected in last year’s blue wave voted for impeachment, some at real political risk, given the conservative lean of their districts.

“Today, especially today, I reflect on the founding documents that have set us apart in the world, leading people across generations and across the world to risk everything because of their belief in our great nation,” said the Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a Constitution scarf around her neck, her voice charged with emotion.

Women and people of color, of course, were originally outside the protection of those founding documents. But on Wednesday, the most diverse Congress in history declared that even the most powerful white man in the world should be bound by them. When Republicans act as if that’s a sacrilege, they show us what they worship.