Rashida Tlaib, a newly elected Democratic representative from Michigan, began her tenure in Congress by saying what most members of her party are merely thinking. “When your son looks at you and says, ‘Mamma, look, you won—bullies don’t win,’” she said at a MoveOn event in Washington shortly after her swearing-in ceremony. “And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t, because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!’”

The Oedipal jab at President Donald Trump prompted a wave of hand-wringing in Washington. Some observers expressed concern that the Democratic Party was following in Trump’s footsteps by abandoning civility in the public sphere. “Rep. Tlaib took the politics of Washington deeper down the drain,” Utah Senator Mitt Romney wrote on Twitter. “Elected leaders should elevate, not degrade, our public discourse.” Democrats fumed to reporters, for the most part anonymously, that the insult upset their party’s talking points on potential impeachment charges. “I don’t really like that kind of language,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on CNN.

While debates about civility in American politics are often performative, this one was revealing. Most of the criticism of Tlaib centered on her use of the word “motherfucker” rather than her substantive point, leaving Trump to be his own loudest defender against the idea of removing him from office. “How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?” he wrote on Twitter last week.

Presidents typically don’t need to insist that they shouldn’t be impeached. That Trump feels compelled to do so signals that the impeachment process is effectively underway. The debate has moved beyond threshold questions, like whether impeachment is warranted, and the discussion now centers on practical and political considerations. The effort is unlikely to succeed, as things stand now. But even if nothing comes of these shadow impeachment proceedings, they still may serve a purpose: deterring Trump from further abuses of power.

Thanks to the results of last year’s midterm elections, there are almost certainly enough votes in the House to impeach Trump—and almost certainly not enough votes in the Republican-controlled Senate to convict him. Even if the entire Democratic caucus voted to convict Trump, twenty Republican senators would need to join them to oust him from office. That’s an extraordinarily high barrier for Trump’s opponents to overcome in a hyper-partisan climate. Support for impeachment may also wane overall as 2020 draws closer; lawmakers and the public may be uncomfortable with removing a president from office so close to an election, which could accomplish the same result but with greater political legitimacy.