With the political madness of recent weeks — the shutdown and the smackdowns, the incitements and the indictments — it’s easy to forget there is much actual governing to be done by the new Congress: bills to introduce, nominees to consider and, for House Democrats in particular, oversight of the executive branch to conduct. Major oversight.

Attempting to hold this administration to account will be among the new Democratic majority’s most vital, and most fraught, duties — especially after two years of cowed Republicans letting the president operate unchecked. A White House has perhaps never more vividly demonstrated the need for some countervailing force to check its corruption and incompetence, its disdain for the Constitution and its assault on democratic norms.

But precisely because there are so many legitimate avenues of inquiry, Democrats must proceed with caution to avoid looking as though they’re piling on in a punitive or grossly partisan manner. While many Democrats and not a few anti-Trump Republicans would doubtless be delighted to see the president subjected to daily investigative torture, House Democrats cannot afford to alienate the independents and swing voters needed to send him packing in 2020. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that a plurality of independents already expect the new House majority to go overboard with its oversight, and even some Democratic lawmakers have expressed unease. Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the new Budget Committee chairman, recently joked that Congress would “have to build an air traffic control tower to keep track of all the subpoenas flying from here to the White House.”

Eager to fuel this perception, Team Trump has been smearing Democrats as engaged in a campaign of “presidential harassment.” It’s the president’s signature move: attack anyone or anything that displeases him — the news media, the courts, the electoral process, insufficiently obsequious Republicans, his own Department of Justice, science — to undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of his base.