Until yesterday, conventional wisdom held that for Democrats, even discussing the prospect of impeachment was a silly, irresponsible stunt, the sort of thing that played well on Paperclip Twitter but that, as a practical matter, undermined the credibility of any lawmakers who engaged in it. With sad-eyed invertebrate Paul Ryan and unprincipled liar Mitch McConnell minding the gates on Capitol Hill, why bother? After all, if the party exhausted itself shrieking about high crimes and misdemeanors, they would be powerless to put up a fight when Donald Trump and company moved to, say, dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

Until yesterday!

Yesterday, a jury of Paul Manafort's peers found him guilty of a host of federal financial crimes, and it appears that the former Trump campaign manager will live out his remaining days wearing uniforms of a different style than those to which he has grown accustomed. Minutes later, Michael Cohen copped a plea deal in which he acknowledged, among other things, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions. Cohen acted at Trump's direction, he says, in order to prevent stories about the then-candidate's extramarital affairs from influencing the 2016 election. These are federal crimes, and ones to which the President of the United States is arguably an unindicted co-conspirator. Guess what! The Constitution prescribes a method for Congress to right this wrong.

It is true that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell remain very much in charge of their respective legislative chambers, and that because impeachment is a political procedure and not a judicial one, there is a zero percent chance that either one of them lifts a finger in response to these revelations. Ryan's office acknowledged that the speaker is aware of the Cohen plea, but stated that he needs "more information than is currently available." (To do what? He doesn't know. It sounded like the right thing to say.) McConnell, meanwhile, is too busy hustling a Reagan-shaped suit through the Supreme Court confirmation process to even take notice.

It is also true, however, that there is an election in less than three months, and that for the first time in the Trump presidency, Democrats have the opportunity to flip the power dynamics that, to this point, have rendered their criticisms moot. With these honest-to-God convictions on the books, a dubiously-reasoned Department of Justice memorandum may be the only thing preventing Robert Mueller from marching in to the West Wing tomorrow. This is great time for the party to tell voters what they would do, if given the chance, about the president's sprawling crime syndicate: Investigate the hell out of it, and, if their findings align with those of the special counsel's office, to waste no time fulfilling their constitutional duty to impeach.

Watch:

Have We Got Enough to Impeach Trump Already?