Predictably, the debate over the impeachment of Donald Trump devolved into partisan spectacle. The scene began on Wednesday night and stretched into Thursday as Democrats, eager to shuttle the impeachment inquiry over to the Senate, pushed ahead with a committee vote on two articles of impeachment—one charging Trump with abuse of power, and the other with obstruction of Congress. Republican obsequiousness, Democratic exclamations of a constitutional crisis, and political feuding along party lines defined the House Judiciary Committee hearing. The committee vote was certainly historic, marking only the fourth time in the history of the United States that articles of impeachment were introduced on the House floor. But as the speeches continued into the night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s grand plan was coming into focus off-screen. “She definitely has control of everything,” a senior progressive Democratic staffer said. “I’ll give her that.”

Pelosi says she never wanted impeachment, and given her past, it’s a believable statement. As she explained to me earlier this year, she lived through the impeachment of Bill Clinton and saw a divided country in its aftermath. After ascending to power in the House in the early aughts, she dismissed calls to impeach George W. Bush over dragging the U.S. into the Iraq War. The country had to avoid falling into a pattern of impeachment. But the Ukraine scandal presented an exception to her rule. Withholding a coveted White House visit and military aid unless the fledgling Ukrainian government pledged to investigate an unfounded conspiracy theory about the 2016 election and one of Trump’s political rivals crossed the Rubicon.

Pelosi’s reluctance to impeach Trump was rooted in politics as much as principle. And now, as the issue hurtles toward Senate leader Mitch McConnell, much of her focus, once again, is on politics. Impeachment was long viewed as politically unpalatable in the House districts that matter most to House Democrats. But after the Ukraine scandal shifted the calculus, a vote on articles of impeachment has been seen on Capitol Hill as an inevitability. “There is always the wild card in the White House that could change things…. But I don’t see anything slowing the process down significantly at this point,” Representative Mike Quigley told me last week. “I think that the train is moving forward. It is out of the station.”

The two articles of impeachment are expected to pass overwhelmingly in the Democrat-controlled chamber when they hit the floor for a vote, likely next week. According to multiple congressional sources, anywhere between two and a half-dozen Democrats or so could break with the party line and vote against the articles. But the number will fall far short of the number needed to tank impeachment. “Nancy is extraordinarily good at counting votes,” a senior Democratic congressional aide told me.

But this will still leave a number of frontline Democrats—lawmakers who either flipped seats from red to blue or triumphed in districts Trump won in 2016—in the exact position they sought to avoid. So the Speaker is sending them back home over the holiday recess with other wins for their constituents. Within an hour of unveiling the two articles of impeachment on Tuesday, Pelosi turned around and struck a deal with Trump on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. The decision prompted outrage from some corners of the left. Why give Trump a victory the same day you drop the hammer on impeachment? Sources familiar with Pelosi’s strategy, however, dismissed this as a Twitter liberal talking point, pointing to the congressional calendar and arguing that this is evidence of Democrats’ ability to “walk and chew gum at the same time”—a common Pelosi refrain.