That will be the central question before the Senate. It would take 20 Republicans, along with everyone in the Democratic caucus, for the Senate to reach the two-thirds majority required to remove Trump. The winless New York Jets have a better shot at the Super Bowl.

The political calculation will guide some, but not all. There are already breaches in the Fox News firewall, and a stunning 28 percent of Republican voters in one recent poll favor the impeachment inquiry.

Playing to the larger moral issues is where the Mormon charge will be crucial. Another Mormon senator, Mike Crapo of Idaho, has kept an open mind thus far. An independent presidential candidate from 2016, Evan McMullin, has been a principled Mormon critic of Trump’s lawlessness.

“Remember that Trump will tear down anyone who rightfully challenges him,” McMullin said this week. “Unable to lead with honor, all he has left is to make everyone seem as rotten as he is.”

The rot among the collaterally rotten is already deep. White evangelicals — having looked the other way while the Stable Genius, showing his “great and unmatched wisdom,” put kids in cages, praised neo-Nazis, sucked up to murderous dictators and betrayed our beleaguered allies the Kurds — are gone, lost to the dark side.

Most despicable of all, the Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress has suggested that impeaching Trump could cause a “Civil War-like fracture” in the country. Jeffress has also said terrible things about Jews, Mormons and Catholics — the kind of hate talk that has not kept him from being one of Trump’s closest evangelical advisers.

You have to believe that most Republicans in Congress know Trump has violated his oath of office. But most of them are also cowards. That goes for some Mormon Republicans, such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a former Trump critic, now an enabler. For them, the old line from J.R. Ewing is apt: “Once you give up your integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.”