Jerrold Nadler has been fighting Donald Trump for decades. The New York Democrat, who represents much of the Upper West Side and big chunks of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, first tussled with Trump back in the nineteen-eighties. He met Trump in 1985, when Nadler was a state assemblyman, and Trump bought some eighty acres on the West Side of Manhattan that he wanted to develop. “I led the opposition to it, and I fought him for ten or fifteen years on that project,” Nadler told me Thursday. “He ended up building the proposal, but I ended up costing him a lot of money.” Years later, when Trump tried to secure money from a post-9/11 program for small businesses, to benefit his office tower at 40 Wall Street, Nadler protested. “It was a misuse of the funds that I got put into the law,” he said. “Because 40 Wall Street is a skyscraper. It’s not a small business.”

Nadler’s opposition to Trump earned him a permanent place on Trump’s enemies list. Unlike other prominent New York Democrats, Trump never contributed to Nadler’s congressional campaigns or invited him to his weddings. Trump once wrote that Nadler was one of the three worst politicians in America. The other two were the senators Bill Bradley and Lowell Weicker. “I thought I was in pretty good company,” Nadler said.

This week Nadler launched a new crusade against Trump. Like most Americans, Nadler was dumbstruck when he watched Trump’s press conference last Tuesday at Trump Tower, where the President insisted that there were “very fine people” marching in a protest organized by a collection of neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, and that “both sides” were to blame for any violence, apparently including the murder of Heather Heyer, the anti-racism demonstrator who was run over by a white supremacist.

One of the most important questions in the wake of Trump’s noxious comments is what happens in our system when the President abdicates his role as a healer and moral authority in American public life. Nadler argued that Congress needed to fill the vacuum. “I thought immediately, we’ve got to say this does not represent the United States,” he told me. “We’ve got to censure him, because I cannot remember a President who, in effect, gives aid and comfort to Nazis and white supremacists. It’s just so far beyond the pale.”

No President has been censured since the Senate voted to censure Andrew Jackson, in 1834, over a dispute about producing a document. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, some Democrats and Republicans discussed censuring Bill Clinton rather than pursuing impeachment. Nadler’s resolution, which as of Friday morning had attracted seventy-nine Democratic co-sponsors, is the first serious censure proposal since the Clinton era.

There are no consequences that come with a censure resolution, and, were it to pass, Trump would probably be unperturbed by it. But Nadler argues that it is crucial for Congress to go on the record with some kind of formal condemnation. “The President is usually seen as speaking for the nation, and we have to say that on this he is not speaking for the nation,” Nadler told me. “There are three branches of government, one of which doesn’t comment on anything—the judiciary. Congress is the only alternative to come out and say we repudiate the President, and, not only do we repudiate him, this does not speak for the United States; this is morally repugnant to us.”

Normally, a resolution condemning Trump from a partisan anti-Trump Democrat like Nadler wouldn’t gain much momentum. But censuring Trump is an idea that could gain political traction in both parties. For Democrats, it is an alternative to impeachment, which Nancy Pelosi has been trying to prevent Democrats from pushing. “The leadership has discouraged us from getting onto impeachment articles,” Representative Stephen Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat who called for impeaching Trump after his comments about Charlottesville, but who also supports Nadler’s censure effort, said. “Leadership’s argument is that they’re going to hang themselves, and we need to be talking about economic issues, and ‘A Better Deal,’ the new slogan.”

The real question is whether any Republicans will support censure. If the Republican leadership refuses to consider the proposal, both Nadler and Cohen said that they would try to force the resolution onto the House floor though a discharge petition, which requires a majority of the House to sign onto it, meaning that they would need every Democrat and two dozen Republicans. If Trump continued to stand by his comments, the censure resolution could become an avenue for Republicans to express their dismay when Congress reconvenes after Labor Day. At the moment, though, most House Republicans have adopted either silence or public statements that condemn the Charlottesville racists without criticizing Trump himself.

Would Trump care about a strongly worded resolution from the House? Probably not. But in the current crisis, in which the President has failed so miserably to offer any moral leadership and his senior staff and Cabinet members have shown no willingness to resign in protest, congressional censure is one option that might offer the country and the world reassurance that Trump wasn’t speaking this week for all Americans.

“We have to censure,” Nadler said. “That is the only avenue open to us to express the depth of moral revulsion at what he’s doing.”