The possibility of impeachment has been part of the political atmosphere since President Trump’s election, but this week it grew not only more tangible but also more specific. The debate over whether to remove the President from office will not begin with arguments over Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election, or President Trump’s detention of children at the border, or his Administration’s pattern of self-dealing and corruption, but over the question of whether the President held up military aid to the Ukrainian government this summer on the condition that its President provide him with damaging information about the Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. View more There are many ways to tell the story of how, exactly, this came to be, but one begins at 9 P.M. on Monday, when the Washington Post published an op-ed by seven freshmen Democratic members of Congress, arguing that the Ukraine allegations, if true, “represent an impeachable offense.” The seven Democrats were not especially famous, but they shared several significant characteristics. Each had a lengthy record of military or intelligence service, each had won a seat in Congress in 2018, each had defeated a Republican incumbent, and each represented a moderate district that was seen as vulnerable to being lost to the Republicans in 2020. The op-ed had a pointed earnestness. “Everything we do harks back to our oaths to defend the country,” the seven freshmen wrote. “These new allegations are a threat to all we have sworn to protect.” Almost exactly thirty minutes after the op-ed was published, one of its authors, Elaine Luria, of Virginia, was sitting on Rachel Maddow’s set. Luria is a retired naval commander, and she was wearing her House-member pin as a pendant around her neck. Maddow asked her how she had reached the decision to support impeachment. Luria replied, “Well, my thinking process is, if this particular instance that’s happened, with the President of the United States enlisting a foreign leader to assist him in conducting an investigation that will smear and damage his potential political opponent in the upcoming election, and in the process of doing that potentially withhold foreign aid to that country—if this isn’t impeachable, what is?” She used the word “concise” to describe the case against the President, and she seemed to be making an effort to be concise herself, picking her words carefully. Luria represents a particular strain of the midterm triumph of 2018—she was a political novice and a national-security lifer who was said to have run not out of ideological conviction but out of a patriotic concern for the fate of the country under Trump. Luria’s co-authors have similar backgrounds: Abigail Spanberger, of Virginia, and Elissa Slotkin, of Michigan, are veterans of the C.I.A. Mikie Sherrill, of New Jersey, overlapped with Luria at the Naval Academy, and became a helicopter pilot. Gil Cisneros, of California, served as an officer in the Navy; Jason Crow, of Colorado, led a platoon of paratroopers during the invasion of Iraq. Chrissy Houlahan, who represents a district in suburban Philadelphia, was a lieutenant in the Air Force and a captain in the Air Force Reserve. Voters in the swing districts they represented had seemed to want these embodiments of the sturdy, national-security center to serve as a check on the President. But those voters might not have anticipated that the sturdy, national-security center would, in less than a year, be propelling the nation toward impeachment. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, read the op-ed on a plane to Washington, and began making notes for her own speech declaring an impeachment inquiry, which she delivered a little less than twenty-four hours later.

The seven Democrats have been a cadre since they arrived in Washington, in January. They are friends. They keep a running group chat on Signal. They have regular meals and get-togethers; their families know one another. “We aren’t necessarily ideologically aligned,” Houlahan told me on Thursday, sitting on a very stiff-looking couch in her D.C. office. The affinity sounded more tribal. She pointed out that few Americans serve in the military, and that most who do have a family tradition. “So we have a really tight bond. We trust each other.” Most of the time, this group has tended toward similar positions, but not always. In July, frustrated by the Administration’s refusal to deliver witnesses to House investigations, Crow announced he was in favor of an impeachment inquiry, but none of the others were with him. For many of them, impeachment had an incredible weight. “I think the calculation for me was the damage that it could do to the nation, and trying to make sure that if there were ever a place where I felt like we needed to move forward, that it was a place where I felt like it was explainable to people,” Houlahan said. “I’m trying to articulate that there’s nothing more destructive to the country than what we’re doing.” One reason that none of the seven had supported impeachment during the Mueller investigation was that the story was so convoluted. The original transgressions took place when Trump was a candidate, and in a more ambiguous constitutional position. The Mueller report wasn’t an easy read, either. “There was so much information,” Luria said. “I mean, you’re going to present to this average person this five-hundred-page report and expect them to distill it? It’s so complicated, you know, like one of those diagrams in a detective movie, with the pins and the pieces of string between all the different players. And we were still in the process of investigating, because we didn’t even understand everything related to it.” The story of Trump and Ukraine was much neater. It fit on a five-page memo. “You can sit down and read it in ten minutes,” Crow told me. “And it’s breathtaking.” Crow and I were sitting in a cafeteria deep in the Capitol—a gray and beige institutional redoubt that forces you to notice that everyone around you is wearing a badge on a lanyard. The freshman national-security Democrats are an earnest, Eagle Scout sort of group, and Crow is especially so—he mentioned the “oath” he had taken several times. “Part of what makes this different is that it is current, and prospective—it’s not backward-looking,” Crow said. Trump had presented an implicit quid pro quo—military aid, in return for Ukrainian interference in the 2020 election—but neither side had delivered. This put the impeachers in a different, perhaps less partisan, position: they would not be punishing a crime, but preventing one. I asked Crow whether he would have been as sure about pursuing impeachment if it had taken longer for the whistle-blower’s allegations to become public. Crow said, “If this had happened a year or two ago, it might dictate the manner in which we proceed. The fact that we have to move with some urgency and focus is in part the result of the fact that it is ongoing. And we don’t know what damage has been done and the extent of that damage and what needs to be done to address it.” “A constant dialogue was going on,” Crow added. “Number one, how shocking it was, how it really hit us to our core. Number two, all of our desire to do something about it. And number three, that, given our backgrounds, we could come together as a group and have a role in the response.” How quickly to move, and in exactly what way, was less obvious. They only had five days before Congress went into recess. “We were on the same trajectory, but maybe not the same timeline,” Luria told me. Luria herself was already committed, with or without the group. She had prepared a statement supporting impeachment, and by Sunday afternoon her advisers were working to book her on television to make her case. By Sunday evening, all seven members of the group had essentially agreed on impeachment, and they were working on a draft of the op-ed in Google Docs. Early on Monday afternoon, they sent it to the Washington Post’s editorial page. Then they called Pelosi to tell her it would be published. “We’re of the school that you don’t surprise your leadership,” Luria said. But it was a notification, not a question. The op-ed itself was sharp and concise, perhaps because its authors were clear about what they presenting: not a litigation of details but a declaration of identity. “We have devoted our lives to the service and security of our country,” they wrote. “These allegations are stunning, both in the national security threat they pose and the potential corruption they represent.”

When I met Luria at her office on Thursday, she told me that there had been no long evolution in her views on impeachment. The break was very clear. Nothing that Trump had done until the middle of the summer seemed to her to meet the standard for impeachment, but the pressure he had put on the Ukranian President did. “It’s seeking to alter a future election. It’s leveraging the full power of the United States government by withholding taxpayer money appropriated by Congress to support the defense of Ukraine,” she told me. “What has happened here is clearly a violation of the oath that the President took—the same one that I took—to support and defend the Constitution. He’s supposed to be looking out for the common good, not his personal good. And, to me, he’s clearly using the position of his office—backed, in this case, by the weight of the U.S. government and its military assistance—for his personal gain, by trying to get dirt on his political opponents so that he can bolster his chances for reëlection. This is very cut and dried.” On the desk in front of Luria was a printed copy of the government memorandum documenting Trump and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call, stamped, in red, “UNCLASSIFIED.” Luria picked it up and started reading it. “Put yourself in the shoes of President Zelensky,” she said. “You need this foreign aid from the United States for military assistance. And the country you are now President of was invaded in 2014. And you want to buy some more missile systems and anti-tank missiles to defend yourself. And then the President uses the words, Hey, can you do me a favor?” Luria paused. “Those words. It’s off-color.” She looked back at the transcript and recounted how Trump had asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son, and had said, of conspiracy theories surrounding them, “ ‘It sounds horrible to me.’ Well, if it sounds horrible to you, what’s it supposed to be for Zelensky? You’re gonna provide something that says, yes, this is horrible. And now you can have your two hundred and fifty million dollars.” Luria said that people have asked her, “what if there is not an explicit connection,” between the “favor” and the aid? She said, “I think it’s implicit.” It is early enough in the impeachment saga that the arguments I heard on the Hill still had a pre-lawyered flavor—politicians were working out a public position from private sentiments. I thought I heard in Luria’s talk of oaths and constitutional responsibilities a kind of cadet’s honor, and asked her whether she thought of her position, the one she and her colleagues had staked out in the Washington Post, as idealistic. Luria looked uncomfortable with the term; it didn’t describe her to herself. She said, “Pragmatic is what I would say.”