This is madness. We should stop trying to make Mueller happen, not because the special prosecutor’s findings are unimportant but because they are so very beside the point. The president just told four American members of Congress to go back to where they came from and then presided over a rage-soaked white-power rally that would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud. Why, after that, are we still looking for reasons to impeach this man? And why are we holding televised hearings into something completely different?

Sure, I get it: Obstruction of justice is A Very Big Deal. In an ordinary political climate it could be the undoing of a president, especially obstruction in the service of derailing an investigation into foreign election meddling. Russia ran a bunch of divisive Facebook ads and hacked Democrats’ emails. Someone should probably do something.

Fine, but shouldn’t we first make sure racism has no place in the White House? How about we begin impeachment proceedings on that urgent question: Is it O.K. to have a racist president? And, indeed, how about we start not today but two years ago, when Trump praised the Nazis who marched on Charlottesville? Or when his administration lied to everyone about the racist impetus for adding a citizenship question to the census? Or when he started separating immigrant families at the border? Or during his first month in office, when he put into place an executive order codifying his Muslim ban?

You might argue, as some constitutional scholars did last week, that racism is not an impeachable offense. The theory seems to be that Trump has a First Amendment right to racism, and presidents are entitled to their preferred policy, even if they’re bigoted. In this view , Mueller’s findings are a better way to do Trump in — like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, they’re a means, if not an end.

But that’s a failure of imagination. Constitutional scholars also note that impeachment is a political act, and that the Constitution’s language about “high crimes and misdemeanors” has in the past been interpreted to cover a wide range of acts that politicians of the day deemed unacceptable. Indeed, one of the articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson went directly to his language. In a series of election rallies, Johnson had engaged in racist and demeaning rhetoric against blacks in general and several members of Congress. He’d suggested hanging the abolitionists Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips. “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men,” he declared.

Johnson was impeached by the House, but, by a single vote, was saved from removal from office by the Senate. It is time, now, to relitigate that history. We should have a political debate about whether or not racist federal governance should endure in America. It is not as if we don’t have enough evidence to make the case that Trump’s politics are racist. And if Republicans want to argue that Trump isn’t a racist or that racism isn’t disqualifying, let them make the case. Make them go on record, again and again, over months of hearings, defending all the tweets they claim not to have read. Talk about bad optics.

Last week, Representative Al Green of Texas attempted to make just this case in a resolution calling for Trump’s impeachment on the grounds of racism. “The Mueller testimony has nothing to do with his bigotry. Nothing. Zero. Nada,” Green told reporters. “We cannot wait.”