So, too, with Congress’s impeachment power. The two most recent efforts are noteworthy not for the presidential acts deemed unacceptable by the House, but for the categories of misconduct deemed by the Senate to be inadequate grounds for removal.

Clinton was impeached in part for lying to a grand jury about “the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate Government employee,” as the articles approved by the House in 1998 put it, and about his “prior perjurious, false and misleading testimony he gave in a Federal civil rights action brought against him.” That charge stemmed from a civil lawsuit over alleged sexual harassment that occurred prior to his time as president. The Supreme Court unanimously refused to stay litigation in the civil lawsuit until Clinton reentered private life. When Clinton’s efforts to cover up an affair with a White House intern came to light, both Republicans and a number of Democrats initially viewed his behavior as impeachable. Later, though, the majority of Democrats took the position that immoral behavior was not grounds for impeachment, even if Clinton had lied about it under oath. Extramarital sex, they reasoned, had little if anything to do with abuse of the far-reaching powers of the presidency for personal gain, and Republicans could not muster the two-thirds majority necessary to convict and remove Clinton.

The net precedential effect of that impeachment, then, was that a crime having nothing to do with an abuse of office does not warrant removal.

The Trump case involves precisely the opposite scenario: an abuse of office without a companion article of impeachment expressly alleging a crime. (Obstruction of Congress can be a crime, but House Democrats did not frame it as such.) During Wednesday’s hearings, Democrats emphasized that the president is not a king, that Article II does not give him unlimited discretion to conduct foreign policy, that the Framers’ deep concern that an unscrupulous president would abuse his office to sway elections in contravention of national-security interests has come to fruition, and that the legislative branch must remain a vibrant check on the office of the presidency in the face of “extreme and unprecedented” obstruction.

Trump’s backers argued in response that the first article of impeachment—abuse of power—is so dangerously vague that it could leave future presidents vulnerable to impeachment just for doing their job. Republicans also claimed that impeachable conduct requires a crime supported by direct evidence that’s devoid of “hearsay”—a legal term that has been misused and misapplied routinely during the course of the impeachment process. By the standards Republicans have set, no evidence short of an admission by Trump that he abused his office and obstructed Congress in violation of the Constitution would suffice to prove his guilt. Never mind that, if a full confession were required to convict in criminal trials, the nation’s prisons would be largely empty.