Read: Impeach Donald Trump

The Constitution allows impeachment for treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors, but doesn’t elaborate, so Congress will have to decide how to interpret those terms in the 21st century. So far, House leaders have focused on Trump’s efforts to withhold congressionally authorized funds from Ukraine in an effort to pressure the Ukrainian government into helping Trump discredit a potential electoral rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. The House could choose to take up other issues as well, including those investigated by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, such as Trump’s behavior during the 2016 election and his subsequent efforts to obstruct the Mueller investigation itself. House leaders could, if they wish, also examine Trump’s alleged violations of the emoluments clause or any other behavior they view as a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

With impeachment proceedings now set to go public, there will be several crucial moments for Republicans in Congress. When it comes time for the House vote, will congressional Republicans vote for the articles of impeachment? And, assuming the House votes to impeach (only a simple majority is required), will any Senate Republicans join Democrats in voting to remove Trump from office, for which a two-thirds majority is needed? If some Republicans peel off to support impeachment or removal, Republican voters may be more inclined to trust the process. If, on the other hand, Republicans in Congress remain uniformly opposed to impeachment, they will send a signal to future presidents that partisanship matters more than oaths to support and defend the Constitution.

Election Integrity and Fairness

There is overwhelming evidence that adversarial foreign powers—Russia, most notably—covertly influenced the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor, and now evidence is mounting that foreign adversaries hope to influence the 2020 elections as well. Yet U.S. electoral systems remain dangerously vulnerable to hacking and other forms of manipulation. Seventeen states do not have laws requiring the verification of vote tallies, and many states don’t require paper records of voter choices, making those choices impossible to verify. Although federal legislation and funding could rapidly improve election security, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to block most meaningful reform efforts. The ongoing failure to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the vote tally jeopardizes the most basic requirement of democracy: If people can’t be sure that reported voting tallies reflect actual votes cast, how can they be sure that the government truly reflects the consent of the governed?

Read: Here’s what foreign interference will look like in 2020

Another animating principle of the American experiment is that the free flow of information allows citizens to make informed political choices. This principle is also now at risk, threatened by bad actors (both foreign and domestic) who intentionally spread disinformation online, facilitated by internet platforms that refuse to clamp down on deliberate disinformation campaigns. Twitter recently took an important step toward reducing the spread of disinformation online by banning political ads ahead of the 2020 election, but Facebook and other social-media giants seem content to allow their platforms to be used to disseminate falsehoods and whip up hatred. Here too, simple steps to verify information in political ads—undertaken voluntarily by social-media corporations or mandated by federal legislation—would greatly reduce the spread of online propaganda, and protect the ability of citizens to make informed voting decisions.