Al Green cuts a distinctive figure around the Capitol. He is, for starters, the only male member of the House of Representatives with a ponytail. He expresses himself with a kind of baroque humility; to the question “How are you?” he invariably responds, “Better than I deserve.” (Elaborating, if asked, he says that he is a “recovering sinner.”) He is unusual, too, because, while most politicians call attention to their triumphs and hide their failures, Green reserves a place of honor in his congressional office for two reminders of crushing, if perhaps temporary, legislative defeats. Last year, Green—who, since 2005, has represented a district centered on Houston—sponsored the first vote in the House of Representatives on the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On December 6th, the House rejected Green’s initiative to bring impeachment up for debate by a vote of 364–58. The following month, the House rejected a similar attempt by Green, this time by a vote of 355–66.

Notwithstanding the lopsided results, Green has placed copies of each of the resolutions in portfolios embossed with the gold seal of the House. The December resolution is paired with a list of the members who voted for it—they are called “THE FIRST 58.” The January resolution faces a page containing the names of its supporters, who are called “THE HISTORIC 66.” Green sent identical copies of the portfolios to all the congressmen who voted with him.

Green, a Democrat, never supported Trump, although he also never imagined that he would be advocating his forced removal from office. “I didn’t come to Congress to impeach a President,” he told me. “I came to Congress to negotiate the issues that I grew up with—poverty, housing—for the least, the last, and the lost.” But Green began contemplating Trump’s removal when the President fired James Comey, the F.B.I. director, in May, 2017. Three months later, when Trump equated white-supremacist protesters in Charlottesville with those who had rallied against them, Green decided to take formal action: “That’s when I realized he was unfit to be President. He was converting his bigotry into American policy.” When the resolution came up for a vote, he said, “I did not lobby anyone, because, quite frankly, it’s a question of conscience.” He pressed for the second vote after Trump referred to Haiti and other predominantly black nations as “shithole countries.” Green understood that his call for impeachment was symbolic, but he expressed satisfaction with the number of votes he received—nearly a third of the Democratic members of the House. “I concluded if but one person voted for this article, this would be the right thing,” he said. “And we are not finished.”

Today, the impeachment of Donald Trump exists on the brink of plausibility. The sine qua non of an impeachment investigation, to say nothing of actual votes to charge and remove the President, is a Democratic takeover of the House in the November elections. Such a change now looks better than possible, maybe even probable. At the same time, the President appears to be in ever-greater legal peril from dual investigations, one led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the other by federal prosecutors in New York. In April, F.B.I. agents raided the offices of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, and removed telephones and business records. Cohen has not been charged with a crime, but the prospect of a case against him, with the chance that he might plead guilty and reveal everything he knows, represents a substantial risk for the President. In Washington, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, and Rick Gates, who worked on Trump’s campaign and in his White House, have both already pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mueller and agreed to coöperate with his investigation. The full extent of Mueller’s findings is not known, raising the possibility that more legal and political damage to the President is yet to come. While Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, may or may not be correct that Mueller believes he lacks the legal authority to indict the President, the possibility of impeachment clearly exists—if Congress has the evidence, and the will, to proceed.

Trump supporters seem to welcome a fight over the issue. “If the Democrats move for impeachment, I think they are playing right into the hands of the President,” Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former White House communications director, told me. “He doesn’t have Richard Nixon’s attention span or his O.C.D. about record-keeping. There are no e-mails or tapes. He didn’t do anything wrong on Russia, so he’ll be exonerated.” Scaramucci added, “You are dealing with a human Pac-Man. He’s the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life.” Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the Newsmax Web site, who sees the President regularly at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, told me, “The guy loves a fight and will see this one as easily winnable.” Republicans believe a push for impeachment would likely be a disaster for the Democrats in the midterms. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top strategist, told me, “Anger and fear drive off-year elections, and we are going to talk about how the Democrats want to shut us up by impeaching Trump when they couldn’t beat him in 2016. People are talking about the Republicans losing forty seats in the House, but if we make the election a referendum on impeachment we could break even or pick up a few.”

Opposition to impeachment seems to be a rare point of agreement between Trump’s followers and the leadership of the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, told me, “I don’t like to talk about impeachment.” She explained, “Impeachment is not a political tool. It has to be based on just the law and the facts. When I was Speaker, people wanted me to impeach George Bush for the war in Iraq because it was based on false information, but you can’t just go from one impeachment to the next. When we are in the majority, we are going to try to be unifying, and there is no way to do impeachment in a bipartisan way right now.” The numbers back up Pelosi’s wariness. According to a Quinnipiac University poll taken in April, fifty-two per cent of American voters oppose impeachment. Another poll from around the same time reported that forty-seven per cent would definitely vote against a candidate who wanted to remove Trump from office. (In a sign of how divided the country is, forty-two per cent would definitely vote for a candidate who made such a promise.)

Still, a powerful grassroots movement has formed in support of impeachment, a political cousin of sorts to the recent pushes for women’s rights and gun control. According to Quinnipiac, seventy-one per cent of Democrats already favor impeachment. To proponents, a nearly fifty-fifty split among the voting public at this early date, before Mueller has reported his findings, is significant. In primaries for the 2018 elections, some prominent Democrats, such as Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, who is running for governor, made support for impeachment a major part of their platforms. Tom Steyer, a San Francisco billionaire, has since last year been running television advertisements supporting impeachment, and has generated a mailing list of more than 5.2 million people. Steyer is now on a thirty-city speaking tour. For the moment, he and his followers are outcasts from the Washington consensus. But their passion, and the mounting evidence against the President, raises the question of whether the drive for impeachment is more likely to result in Trump’s removal from office or in a Democratic civil war.