Just after 9 A.M. on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi made it official: the House of Representatives will vote to impeach President Trump. On Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee had released its report on Trump’s Ukraine affair, calling it a “scheme” to abuse the powers of his office and subvert U.S. foreign policy for his own political benefit. On Wednesday, Pelosi had signalled where she was going with the investigation, calling Trump “a threat to democracy” and convening a private caucus of her members to check their political will for moving ahead. “Are you ready?” she asked. A chorus of “yes”es answered. Republicans had been trying to plant the idea with reporters that some Democrats were getting cold feet—that perhaps Pelosi would not proceed after all, or would offer a censure resolution as an alternative to going ahead with an attempt to remove Trump from office which appeared all but doomed to fail in the Republican-majority Senate.

But, of course, that was not to be. Pelosi set her course in September, when she decided to open the impeachment inquiry, and she will not back down now. She made that clear on Thursday morning, in a short speech from the Speaker’s Balcony in the Capitol, which began with a description of the Declaration of Independence and ended with an emphasis on the Constitution. She spoke of James Madison and Gouverneur Morris—and Donald Trump. “The President,” she said, “leaves us no choice but to act, because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit.” Pelosi did not give answers about what will be in the articles of impeachment that she is now asking her committee chairs to draft, or when exactly the vote, which is expected before the end of the year, will happen. But that was not the point. She was there to say something bigger and more definitive: Donald Trump will be the third President in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, and Nancy Pelosi is owning it.

It was a historic moment in a month that will be full of them. But, if Pelosi is owning the charged politics of impeachment, it’s her partner, Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who has been the public face of the impeachment investigation. He has driven and shaped the narrative, interviewing witnesses and then pointedly summing up their testimony in long, ad-libbed speeches. Republicans compare the former federal prosecutor, an otherwise mild-mannered vegan from Southern California, to Inspector Javert, from “Les Misérables,” hunting Trump obsessively. Trump himself frequently attacks Schiff in strikingly personal terms, as he did on Tuesday, at the NATO summit, when he called him “a deranged human being,” “a maniac,” and “a very sick man.” Trump is right that Schiff is a dangerous enemy. A few months ago, the President’s impeachment was improbable; now, after little more than two months of congressional detective work into the Ukraine matter, and after two weeks of compelling and dramatic public hearings overseen by Schiff, it is essentially inevitable.

At the end of Pelosi’s press conference on Thursday morning, as she was walking out of the room, she was asked by a reporter whether she hated Trump. Visibly angered at the implication that impeachment was some sort of personal vendetta, the Speaker said, “I don’t hate anybody,” and returned to the podium, shaking her finger as she lectured the journalist. “As a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone,” she said. “I pray for the President all the time. So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.” A few hours later on Thursday, I met Schiff for an interview in the Capitol, and he was not so reticent to embrace the H-word. He had heard about Pelosi’s press-conference moment but had not yet seen it. Do you hate Donald Trump, I asked? “No,” he said, “but I do hate what he is doing to the country.” Schiff is not a name-caller, unlike the President whose wrongdoing he has been pursuing. His committee’s three-hundred-page report is his response to Trump. In it, the committee concludes, “The evidence of the President’s misconduct is overwhelming.”

I met Schiff for our interview in between votes, in a room off the House floor. A reception was being set up there, for what it was not clear, and we sat at a round table covered by a red-velvet tablecloth. I told Schiff that I had been struck by the very personal framing of his committee’s report, which begins with a short, first-person preface from Schiff himself. The chairman puts his own gloss on the investigation, calling Trump’s pressure campaign on the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, the reckless “act of a President unbound,” and describing the now-infamous phone call between the two leaders, on July 25th, in which Trump pushed Zelensky to open two politically motivated investigations, as the “dramatic crescendo” of that months-long campaign. He also directly addresses the alternative narrative pushed by Trump and his Republican supporters on Capitol Hill, in which they have not so much contested the facts of the case as refused to recognize them. “The President and his allies are making a comprehensive attack on the very idea of fact and truth,” Schiff writes in the report. “How can a democracy survive without acceptance of a common set of experiences?”

This is not, needless to say, the usual stuff of reports of congressional investigations. Schiff told me that he had consulted major historic documents when considering how to present this one: the Senate’s Watergate report; the select committee’s report on the Iran-contra affair; the independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report that led to President Clinton’s impeachment. He opted for the Watergate example—“the best model,” Schiff said—in which Senator Sam Ervin, a Democrat of North Carolina, famously summarized the affair in a succinct but powerful preface and then later warned of the “lust for power” that had driven Richard Nixon and his men to betray the Constitution.

Schiff’s report has less of Ervin’s outrage and more outright fear for American democracy—a recognition, perhaps, that the several hundred pages of evidence that follow his preface may fail to persuade anyone other than those who are already Trump’s foes. It is the work of someone who knows full well that there are few, if any, Republican votes to be won. During the House Intelligence Committee hearings, Republican members listened when Gordon Sondland, a lifelong Republican who is Trump’s own appointee as the Ambassador to the European Union, told the panel that Trump had refused to meet with Zelensky unless he agreed to the investigations that Trump wanted. “Was there a quid pro quo?” Sondland said. “The answer is yes.” Nonetheless, Republicans then went on television and claimed that Sondland had said no such thing, simply ignoring that portion of his testimony. In our interview, Schiff said that this episode had stuck with him as he wrote the report. “This attack on truth has always seemed to me the most corrosive to our democracy, the idea that there’s no such thing as fact anymore,” he said. “Given you have witnesses say there was a quid pro quo and then members [who] hear that would say, ‘no one is saying there is a quid pro quo.’ It’s, like, Did you just hear what the witness said?”