Read: Adam Schiff’s opening statement in the first impeachment hearing

Start with the multiple threats of resignation that Ambassador William Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, indicated he’d made with utter sincerity (an indication confirmed by the written record). Threats of resignation by government officials—especially officials like Taylor, with decades of service to presidents of both political parties—are extremely rare. Given how dramatic a threat of resignation is, and given how frequent such resignations have been under the Trump administration, it’s important to remember that this isn’t, say, an ordinary negotiating tactic for government officials as they jostle with colleagues in formulating policy. Quite the opposite—this is the ultimate card to play, and most government officials go through their entire careers without ever considering it. (I never played it while I served in government!)

Indeed, Taylor’s willingness to resign shows that the Trump White House’s handling of Ukraine matters had far exceeded the bounds of the normal policy-making process. That process sees plenty of internal disagreement and debate—those are healthy features of a functioning policy-making process, and it is designed not only to withstand those, but even to benefit from them in refining U.S. policy.

But a threat to resign is a clear indication that the policy process has broken down—that making things better from within has become impossible. And that complete breakdown is exactly what Taylor described in his testimony: a hijacking of normal foreign policy by Trump, Giuliani, and others who supported them (such as Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney) that made it impossible for even the nation’s top diplomat in Ukraine to have a meaningful voice in setting U.S. policy toward the country where he was assigned. All that was left to him was the threat to resign.

Read: William Taylor’s big impeachment reveal

And it wasn’t just the policy process’s breakdown that was clear to U.S. government officials seeing this all unfold; it was adherence to the law as well. The first day of testimony confirmed earlier reporting that U.S. government officials who realized the nature of the White House’s Ukraine push repeatedly asked that White House national-security lawyers be notified out of concern that matters were headed seriously, even dangerously, awry. That, too, is not normal—not even close to it.

White House national-security lawyers get asked tough legal questions all the time by policy officials. Indeed, it’s their job to answer those questions—just as it was my job when I was one of those lawyers. Determining what U.S. and international laws say about, for example, whether the U.S. can carry out a particular military operation or share certain intelligence with a foreign partner is daily fare.