Their political opponents are casting everything related to investigating Trump as a partisan move, which makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to convince voters that they are trying to fulfill their duty as a coequal branch of government and hold this president accountable. Even if they do have the purest of intentions, a big chunk of the country won’t believe them.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) summed this up Tuesday at Cornell University: “We can’t impeach him for political reasons, and we can’t not impeach him for political reasons. We have to see where the facts take us.”

She said Trump “is goading us to impeach him.” In an interview Wednesday with Washington Post Live, she added that he is “self-impeachable,” a somewhat vague term that, in context with her other remarks, suggests that Pelosi thinks he’s leaving Democrats no choice but to consider action.

“Every single day the president is making a case — he’s becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things he’s doing,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi astutely noted that Trump doesn’t seem to care if he gets impeached. He might even see a political benefit in having Democrats investigate his tax returns, his finances, his involvement in hush-money payments to women and his attempts to stop the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference. The very existence of an investigation is being weaponized. In that climate, how is Congress supposed to get anything done?

Even the sole bipartisan investigation in Congress seems concerned about how the strong political currents will sweep up and muddy its facts.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee has found a “mountain” of evidence about how Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and could publicize its findings soon. The committee chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), told The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian that the panel’s report will have a lot more detail about Russia’s interference than Mueller shared. Though Burr hinted that the committee’s investigation does not implicate Trump’s campaign, he seemed worried that the delicate bipartisan findings will lose all nuance in the light of day.

“The tough thing is, everything that we’re going to report on already has a narrative,” Burr said.

Congress has always struggled to be taken at face value. It’s difficult for the public to untangle lawmakers’ intentions from their partisanship, because Congress is a political body. And it doesn’t help that the two times a president has been impeached, it has been by the opposite party.

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But today’s House Democrats are struggling to navigate a particularly perfect storm of partisanship that makes their constitutionally mandated task of overseeing the executive branch especially difficult.

Trump has remade the Republican Party into an extremely loyal branch of, well, him. The same day that Pelosi made her remarks about impeachment and partisanship, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor that any questions about Trump related to Russia and obstruction of justice should be “case closed,” ignoring the fact that Mueller suggested Congress should examine his findings. McConnell is also dunking his head in the sand about a legal assessment from more than 700 former federal prosecutors, Republican and Democratic, who signed a letter saying that Trump would have been charged with obstruction of justice were he not the president.

But in this Republican Party, loyalty to Trump is what helps you keep your job. So House Democrats must go it alone, which only adds to the perception that they are investigating Trump because he’s the opposition.

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Then there’s the fact that the nation is a year and a half out from an election. Elections supercharge whatever politicization already exists, and this election is especially high stakes for congressional Democrats. They are trying to keep control of the House, battling Republicans for the Senate and desperately want to win the White House.

That means that even if Democrats wanted to impeach Trump, Trump can play the victim. He has before. Polls show that a majority of Americans could be sympathetic to him: They don’t want Congress to impeach Trump even if most think he lied.