At this unprecedented moment in American history, one question hovers over all the rest—it’s the question, previously thought to have been settled with the writing of the Constitution. The Founders were obsessed with not establishing a king in the new country. At the heart of the system of government they devised was the concept that the president must be accountable to the people. Article II, which establishes the presidency, includes a provision by which the Congress can remove a president from office “on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Since then, Americans have believed that there’s a generally agreed upon process for holding a president accountable. The question that now hangs over us is this: What if in the current political context this remedy doesn’t work?

Donald Trump has forced us to wrestle with a problem that the Founders thought they had addressed: a president who flouts constitutional precepts and commits acts that exceed his stipulated and understood powers. Furthermore, in the case of Trump, he doesn’t accept the constitutional remedy for such a situation, and in fact has set out to undermine it. America has been an inventive, even an ingenious country, and so we tend to believe that there must be a solution to most every problem. We’ve overcome challenges—from natural disasters to a Civil War to a nuclear standoff with a strong hostile power that chose to put nuclear-tipped missiles 90 miles off our shore. Or have we been less inventive than lucky? And is our luck inexhaustible? To our knowledge, no special protection has been granted our tiny bit of the universe. For a long time we’ve been told that ours is a special nation. But what if it turns out that we’re not so special after all?

A critical lesson can be drawn from the fact that of the three impeachment efforts in this country’s history, only one was successful in satisfying the nation overall that justice was done—that of Richard M. Nixon. The other two—against Andrew Johnson ostensibly over his removal of a cabinet officer, and Bill Clinton ostensibly over his lying to the grand jury about his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky—failed because they were highly partisan exercises. Moreover, in neither case did the charges meet the constitutional standard for removal from office or reflect grave violations of the constitutional instruction that a president must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”—the violations that underlay the Articles of Impeachment against Nixon.

The effort to impeach Nixon was widely accepted by the country because it proceeded on a bipartisan basis. Furthermore, Nixon had clearly presided over various infractions of the Constitution—illegal wiretapping, break-ins, a cover-up. Finally, the House Judiciary Committee’s proceedings in 1974 were conducted in a serious manner, with a high-level discussion of what the Founders intended, of what was appropriate to hold a president accountable for, so much so that many of us committed to memory passages from the Federalist Papers. The most pertinent and most cited quote was from James Madison’s Federalist 51:

If men were angels no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Peter Rodino, Democrat of New Jersey, and his top advisers decided at the outset that unless the impeachment effort had bipartisan support and came from the committee’s center (as opposed to the ideological left fringe that had first called for Nixon’s impeachment, well before the country was ready), the nation would be inflamed and the question of whether Nixon should be punished would remain unsettled. So as the Judiciary Committee went about its work, the most partisan Democrats and Republicans were isolated. A determined effort was made by Rodino and his allies to entice enough conservative Southern Democrats (these existed at the time) and moderate Republicans (these did, too) to work together in deciding whether Nixon had committed impeachable offenses.