The Mueller report, which the Justice Department released to the public on Thursday morning, is the jaw-dropping account of a corrupt president who tried his hardest to both do collusion-adjacent crimes and to hide evidence of those efforts from law enforcement officials. Although the special counsel's office elected not to indict Donald Trump—since their ability to do so is, at best, a legal gray area—their report sets out a clear road map for Congress, if it so chooses, to fulfill its constitutionally enshrined obligation to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The ink on the report's redactions had scarcely dried, though, when the first round of high-profile House Democrats began nervously pooh-poohing the very idea of bringing Trump to justice in such a manner. "Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months, and the American people will make a judgment," opined House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the number-two Democrat in Congress. (He walked this back later, asserting in a tepid statement that "all options ought to remain on the table" to ensure that "Congress and the American people have all the info they need to know the truth.") "Barring a bipartisan consensus," added former federal prosecutor and current House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, impeachment would be an exercise in futility. "You don’t bring a case if you don’t think you’re going to be successful just to try the case."

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said nothing new about the subject on Thursday. Last month, however, she told Reuters that "unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country." She added: "He's just not worth it." Some Democrats offered less ambiguous visions of what they think the House should do next; freshman representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, among others, promptly announced they would sign on to an impeachment resolution. The party's leadership, however, remains notably reluctant to breathe the i-word in public.

A brief civics recap: Impeachment is analogous to charging a president with crimes, and impeaching a president requires a simple majority vote of the House. If that vote is successful, the chief justice of the Supreme Court presides over a trial in the Senate; if two-thirds of senators vote to convict the president of said charges, the president is removed from office. The point at which Hoyer and Schiff are getting is that even if House Democrats were able to impeach Donald Trump—not a given, since that vote could be a tough one for nervous purple-district Democrats to take—Republicans still control the Senate. None of those 53 Trump dead-enders would dream of even criticizing the president, let alone casting a ballot to boot him from the White House. If you already know Mitch McConnell holds the ultimate trump card (sorry), their reasoning goes, why allow him the opportunity to play it and humiliate you on the national stage?

As majority leader, one of Hoyer's principal concerns is the preservation of that majority. And there is evidence that voters care less about the intricacies of Trump's purported legal jeopardy than they do, say, his fixation with repealing the Affordable Care Act, or his gracious extension of tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires who don't need them. On the campaign trail, Democratic presidential hopefuls report receiving precious few questions about Russia, Mueller, and impeachment. And health care was the most important issue in the 2018 midterm elections, which Democrats won in convincing fashion. Given the party's recent track record of (modest) success and the de facto impossibility of convicting Trump between now and next November, the impulse to remain cautious, keep doing what works, and not risk the election on a doomed impeachment bet is understandable.