When Donald Trump told four freshman congresswomen—Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—to “go back” to their countries of origin, and then doubled down, there was broad consensus within the Democratic Party that he’d crossed a line. But precisely how to calibrate the response was a matter of fierce debate. Ultimately Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought a resolution to condemn the president’s remarks as “racist” to the floor, which passed with 240 votes. But later in the week, another line was crossed. After a crowd of Trump rallygoers chanted “send her back” in response to the president’s ugly soliloquy about Omar on Wednesday night, there is a growing feeling within the Democratic ranks that the original measure was inadequate. “I am glad that the House voted to condemn the president’s remarks, but my view is we need to do something stronger,” Congressman Ro Khanna told me. “We need to go on the record, as a body, to make it clear that this is completely unacceptable.”

On Monday, Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee had introduced a more forceful resolution that would have censured Trump, in addition to condemning him for having “continually maligned and scapegoated immigrants, people of color, and religious minorities, and attempted to use race and national origin to degrade people of color and delegitimize public officials.” In Cohen’s words, Trump “deserves to be in a class with Andrew Jackson, the father of the Trail of Tears and the owner of slaves,” a reference to the seventh president, the only one to be officially censured by Congress.

The resolution was “directed at the president, and not just at his remarks, and it has much more weight, historical weight,” Khanna explained. “If we pass a censure resolution and it includes the pattern of the president’s remarks, then that will be part of the first paragraph written about this president.”

But Democratic leadership didn’t bring Cohen’s resolution to the floor for a vote on Tuesday, opting for a weaker resolution introduced by Congressman Tom Malinowski to condemn the president’s remarks. Pelosi’s thinking, which she elucidated in a closed-door meeting, was that condemning Trump’s remarks as racist, rather than censuring the president himself, might allow some Republicans to support it. In the end, just four GOP lawmakers voted for the resolution.

New York Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants who described this chapter as “incredibly painful,” was not surprised that so few Republicans joined the effort, but said she was proud of those who displayed the courage to do so. She also stressed that Democrats are united in their opposition to the president’s bigotry, and ready to “make sure that we measure our level of disdain.” And yet it seems unlikely that the House will support more powerful language against the president at this time. As of noon on Friday, a total of 28 Democrats signed on as cosponsors of Cohen’s censure resolution—including a handful who joined the effort after the Tuesday vote on the condemnation resolution.

Cohen doesn’t expect Democratic leadership to sign on to his censure resolution anytime soon. He's playing a longer game. At Trump’s rally on Wednesday night, Trump “smiled like Mussolini” and looked “very much like the father of the movement,” Cohen told me. And he believes that the president’s behavior will only get worse. “I am sure that he will step in some more manure in no time, and there will be another opportunity to censure him, and maybe we will do it in the future,” he said.