Washington has been bracing for a full-blown constitutional crisis since the first day of the Trump Presidency, and during the last two and a half years each new boundary-pushing move by the boundary-pushing President has been greeted with fresh warnings that this time is really it. Elisabeth Bumiller, the Washington bureau chief of the Times, even has on her desk a lighthearted sign that her staff gave her for Zeitgeist checks. “Current status: _____ in a constitutional crisis,” it reads. For now, the word “NOT” has been taped over the blank. The capital’s obsessive constitutional pulse-taking, I imagine, resembles the way Californians greet the initial tremors of an earthquake: Is this finally the Big One?

On Wednesday, shortly after the House Judiciary Committee voted, strictly along party lines, to enforce a subpoena issued to Attorney General William Barr for the full contents of the Mueller report and its underlying evidence, the committee’s chairman, Representative Jerry Nadler, proclaimed that this was, in fact, the moment. “We’ve talked for a long time about approaching a constitutional crisis. We are now in it,” the New York Democrat said solemnly. Not long after the vote, I met a new member of Nadler’s committee, Representative Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, and she told me that the hours she had spent listening to her colleagues talk about Trump and the constitutional order had indeed felt like a “standout day.” The vote, she added, was “historic,” “dark,” and necessary, “a constitutional crisis and an important clash of co-equal branches of government.” The next morning, Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed with them on calling it a crisis. “Yes,” she told reporters. The long-predicted confrontation is here and it is real, “because the Administration has decided they are not going to honor their oath of office.”

But is this actually the crisis? There have been so many. How can we tell? Congress has, through the years, had numerous such standoffs over subpoenas with the executive branch, including a conflict between the former Republican leadership of the House and President Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder. The courts resolved that clash just this week, long after both the Obama Administration and the G.O.P. leaders who mounted the case have left the scene. There’s a strong argument that, rather than a crisis, the push by the Democratic House to exercise its oversight and investigative powers over the Trump executive branch is exactly what the Constitution envisions in such cases. Even if the House of Representatives takes the next step, as it is likely to, and goes to court to enforce Barr’s subpoena, there is nothing unprecedented about it (and in fact, the law would appear to be very much on Congress’s side). This is the system working, not its breakdown, and that includes all the sanctimonious, annoying, and often hypocritical partisan speechifying from politicians in both parties that inevitably accompanies such a process.

For those reasons, even many die-hard opponents of Trump have resisted calling this the crisis we’ve all been anticipating. “Whether it is a constitutional crisis or constitutional confrontation, I’ll let you guys [make] the choice. Maybe I’ll stick with confrontation this week,” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Thursday. Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist of Watergate fame, also said that he preferred “constitutional confrontation,” telling CNN, “I don’t think it’s yet a crisis.”

The key word here may be “yet.” Because this is not really just a fight about getting William Barr to testify or hand over the unredacted parts of the Mueller report or its underlying evidence. In recent weeks, Trump has ordered his Administration to take a maximally defiant attitude toward Congress as it pursues an array of investigations of him and his Administration. The President, essentially, is arguing that his Democratic tormenters in the House have no right at all to pursue information and testimony related to him. So Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin this week refused to turn over Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee. And the White House this week demanded that the former White House lawyer Don McGahn refuse to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, although it asserted no such executive privilege to stop him from testifying before the special counsel, Robert Mueller. Trump won’t hand over to the House documents about giving security clearances to his kids or separating other people’s kids from their parents at the border, either.

Politically, Trump seems to be trying to goad the Democrats into taking further action against him. Perhaps he is even looking to push them into a partisan impeachment fight. There’s no question that Trump, for all his bullying, actually loves to play the victim. Whatever he is after, the President has adopted a far more aggressive legal strategy than that of his predecessors, ordering his Administration to carry out a “true structural assault on the idea of congressional subpoena power,” Stephen Vladeck, a legal professor at the University of Texas, told me. “Even at the height of Watergate, I don’t think we ever heard Richard Nixon make such a categorical claim.”

Right after the Democrats won the House in last fall’s midterm elections, Vladeck wrote a prescient piece in the Washington Post, anticipating just this scenario of “serious conflict and, perhaps, even a slow-motion constitutional crisis” between a Democratic House bent on investigations and Trump. He correctly foresaw that Trump was likely to trigger the fight by refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena and also that, though fighting him would take time, the courts were likely to side with Democrats in any such argument. Will Trump defy a court order against him? That would be a crisis. Will he set a new standard for future Presidents eroding Congress’s previously “extremely broad and encompassing” authority to investigate? That, too, would be a crisis. Nadler wasn’t necessarily wrong, but he wasn’t right yet either.

On Trump’s Inauguration Day, in 2017, The Atlantic’s David Frum called the new President a “constitutional crisis on two legs.” Within a few days, Trump’s executive order banning citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. had triggered the first in a long series of debates over just what to call the President’s actions. “We’re really in a crisis mode, a constitutional-crisis mode in our country, and we’re going to need everyone,” Marielena Hincapie, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, told the Associated Press. “This is definitely one of those all-hands-on-deck moments.” Ever since, the hands have remained on deck and ready to go, through the firing of the acting Attorney General Sally Yates, the firing of the F.B.I. director James Comey, the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. At regular intervals throughout Mueller’s two-year investigation, there were urgent warnings that Trump was about to fire Mueller, which would, it was said, trigger the inevitable constitutional crisis.

On January 31, 2017, less than two weeks into Trump’s term, CNN ran an explainer that might well have been the perfect Trump-era example of the genre: “What’s a constitutional crisis—and are we in one?” At times, it can seem like one of those medieval theological debates that may or may not have any true meaning. Perhaps a constitutional crisis by any other name is still a crisis.