The real impeachment battle is about to begin: the televised one. On Thursday, House Democrats are expected to vote through a resolution setting the terms for public impeachment hearings, which could begin as early as the week of November 11th, according to the Times. Initially, the hearings will take place in the House Intelligence Committee, under the leadership of Adam Schiff. When that committee has finished up, it will pass its findings to the House Judiciary Committee, which could hold further hearings of its own before issuing articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.

It seems virtually certain that this will happen, but the timetable remains fluid. Initially, House Democratic leaders had hoped to wrap things up by Thanksgiving. That schedule always seemed unrealistic, and it has now been jettisoned. “We still want to do this expeditiously, but we are not bound by any time deadline,” Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, said on Tuesday. With the 2020 Presidential primaries starting on February 3rd, however, many Democrats remain wary of letting the process drag out. “We would like to deal with all of this before we get into the voting next year,” Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, told Politico.

One thing is certain: we are in for high political drama, as the Democrats seek to make the case for Trump’s removal from office and the President and his allies fight back with everything they have. On Tuesday, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, suggested that, with another funding deadline set for November 22nd, Trump might even shut down the government as a diversion from impeachment. Even if he doesn’t go that far, Trump and his supporters will surely step up their assaults on the Democrats, the process, and the witnesses.

On Tuesday, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a decorated Army officer who was born in Ukraine and is now an Eastern Europe expert on the National Security Council, testified that he was so concerned about Trump’s July 25th conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, which he listened in on, that he reported it to his superiors. Many Trump supporters questioned Vindman’s patriotism in advance of his testimony. One of them, John Yoo, a former Justice Department official, even suggested on Fox News that Vindman might be guilty of espionage. These disgraceful attacks are a sign of things to come.

After years of investigating the President from many different angles—including Russia, obstruction of justice, and financial self-dealing—the Democrats are now looking to present a narrow case focussed squarely on Trump’s attempts to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden and possible Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, using the threat of withholding U.S. aid. Two merits of this approach are that it is easy to understand, and that it has already been supported by the testimony, in non-public hearings, of several current and former Administration officials who were positioned to know what was happening. In addition to Vindman, who is the N.S.C.’s top expert on Ukraine, those officials include Ambassador William Taylor, who is currently the top U.S. diplomat in Kiev, and Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, whom Trump removed.

The impeachment resolution, which runs to eight pages, is designed to provide maximum exposure and minimum distraction to these and other witnesses once they appear on TV. The resolution authorizes staff members for Schiff and the ranking minority member, Devin Nunes, to question witnesses for up to ninety minutes. Only after this lengthy inquisition will other committee members get to ask questions. The aim is to elicit as much information as possible from the witnesses, as well as to prevent the hearings from descending into the disjointed melee as the twenty-two committee members use their five minutes of questioning to draw attention to themselves.

In addition to presenting the key witnesses in a public setting, the resolution authorizes Schiff to release the transcripts of their private depositions, “with appropriate redactions for classified and other sensitive information.” At the end of the hearings, the chair of the committee “will submit a report setting forth its findings and recommendations” to the Judiciary Committee. That report will be published.

Part of the Democrats’ strategy is to rebuff the Republican argument that the impeachment process so far has been a secretive sham. Following the example of the Clinton impeachment hearings, Republicans will be allowed to subpoena witnesses, but only with Schiff’s approval. If he refuses a request, it will be put to the vote of the full committee. The President’s lawyers will also be allowed to attend hearings and question witnesses, but not until the proceedings move to the Judiciary Committee.

Trump and his allies have already dismissed these stipulations as mere window dressing. “The White House is barred from participating at all, until after Chairman Schiff conducts two rounds of one-sided hearings to generate a biased report for the Judiciary Committee,” Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell complained that the Democratic impeachment resolution falls “way, way short” of fairness and due process.

These were merely the opening jabs in a monumental messaging battle for the highest stakes of all: the fate of the Presidency. Relying on the public testimony of longtime public servants who worked for the Trump Administration, Schiff and the Democrats should be able to show pretty clearly how, in putting the squeeze on Ukraine, the President abused his office for personal gain in the very manner that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they included the impeachment clause in the Constitution. According to the Wall Street Journal, even Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, a Trump donor who played a key role in the Ukraine caper, said, during his non-public deposition, that there was a quid pro quo.

Lacking any substantive defense, Trump and his allies will probably rely on slander, diversions, and a tendentious reading of the partial transcript of Trump’s July 25th call with Zelensky. Ultimately, some elected Republicans may fall back on the argument that, even if Trump did demand a quid pro quo, it wasn’t a big enough crime to justify removing him from office. Right now, few people in Washington expect enough Senate Republicans to desert Trump to place him in serious danger of being removed from office.

The one thing that could change this picture is public opinion. Since the end of September, when the anonymous whistle-blower’s complaint emerged, Trump’s approval ratings have dropped by about two percentage points in poll averages—a significant dip, but not yet a catastrophic one. Now the impeachment show is moving to television. What difference will this make? We won’t have to wait long to find out.