In February, 1974, just as the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry into Watergate was getting under way, John Doar, the inquiry’s lead counsel, asked two young staffers to prepare a report. The impeachment of a President was, at the time, all but unprecedented—the only previous instance had taken place more than a century earlier, in 1868—and Doar wanted to know how he and the Committee ought to interpret the famously terse phrase “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which the Constitution, in Article II, Section Four, established as acceptable grounds for impeachment. One of the staffers assigned to the task was Hillary Rodham, a twenty-six-year-old Yale-trained lawyer who’d joined the staff after working at the Children’s Defense Fund. The other was Bill Weld, a twenty-eight-year-old attorney from a Boston law firm, who at that point was still nearly two decades away from being elected the sixty-eighth governor of Massachusetts. Rodham and Weld were among the earliest staff attorneys hired by Doar, and their first project was to determine what counted as impeachable conduct.

As Weld told me last week, the inquiry staff had set up shop in what had recently been the Hotel Congressional, a block away from the Capitol. Not long after Weld started, Doar called him and Rodham into his office. “He said, ‘Bill, Hillary, I need a memo on what’s grounds for impeachment or removal of a President, but it’s Friday afternoon, so what do you say? You have it on my desk Tuesday morning.’ So we went to the Library of Congress and looked in the law books and went nearly blind looking for a definition of what was an impeachable offense. Many weeks later, a whole bunch of us concluded, or realized, that you don’t look in the law books for that; you look in the newspapers.”

Weld found newspaper articles from Philadelphia in 1787, and comments in the Founders’ constitutional debates, about the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India, which would end in acquittal after a seven-year trial for high crimes and misdemeanors—specifically, gross maladministration, corruption in office, and cruelty. The lessons that the inquiry’s report took from English precedent were, on the one hand, that “high crimes and misdemeanors” had “no roots in the ordinary criminal law” and, on the other, that the phrase was used to describe parliamentary impeachments that had to do with “damage to the state in such forms as misapplication of funds, abuse of official power, neglect of duty, encroachment on Parliament’s prerogatives, corruption, and betrayal of trust.”

Weld is running against Donald Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination next year, but, unlike Mark Sanford, who was, briefly, another G.O.P. primary challenger, he thinks that there is no question that Trump ought to be impeached. When I asked what articles he would draw up this time around, he proposed three. “No. 1”—listed under the heading of bribery and extortion—“would be the Ukraine caper, because that’s such a classic example for impeachment,” he said. “The two things that the framers of the Constitution were most worried about were foreign interference in our affairs and corruption of office, by which they meant—and by which I mean—abuse of the President’s office in order to secure a personal gain, a private gain, whether it’s financial, whether it’s political, whether it’s for the President himself, whether it’s for his family.” Weld says that the evidence presented in the House Intelligence Committee’s public hearings in the past two weeks amounts to “the most quintessential, classical example for impeachment and removal that, frankly, I’ve ever seen or could conceive of. I’ve read the transcript of every page of every impeachment trial in the history of the United States, and there’s nothing like this.”

A second article, Weld suggested, might comprise the “ten examples of clear and convincing evidence of obstruction of justice, which are contained in Volume II of Bob Mueller’s report.” There, too, he said, “I can tell you, having conducted and supervised many obstruction-of-justice investigations, I’ve never seen evidence like that. I’ve never seen evidence so clear.” Weld said “a third possible article would be—similar to the third article against President Nixon—contempt of Congress.” On that front, “President Trump and his defenders have gone beyond any historical claim ever made,” he added, by asserting that “Congress has no authority to investigate him at all.” He alluded to a recent speech by William Barr, in which the Attorney General, as Weld put it, “said that the President’s power under Article II is so absolute that he can’t be questioned as to why he exercised the power.” That, Weld said, is “nothing other than the divine right of kings.”

Zoe Lofgren, a representative from California, also worked for Congress during Watergate, on the personal staff of one of the Democrats who served on the Judiciary Committee. Last week, as Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council director, and Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice-President Mike Pence, testified in a lavish committee room three floors below her office, Lofgren recalled the arrival of the Watergate inquiry’s staff at the Hotel Congressional, which she remembers as a “really crummy building.” Though Lofgren was still a law student at the time, and had come to Washington to work on a bankruptcy bill, she helped draft one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon. “It was like trying to figure out, ‘We’ve got all this evidence—what are we going to do?’ ” she said. The articles came together quickly: Doar released a first set of proposed articles on Friday, July 19, 1974; public hearings on a revised set began the next Wednesday; and the first votes were held that Saturday, July 27th.

Lofgren is now the second-most senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and a similar task will soon await her and her colleagues. Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, working in consultation with members on the Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committee, have already begun working on a report that will detail the results of the Ukraine investigation. As Ted Lieu, a Judiciary Committee member from California, told me last Thursday, “A number of people on the Intelligence Committee are going to have a very busy Thanksgiving. They will be writing a report to deliver to the Judiciary Committee, and we’ll get that some time in early December.” Once the Judiciary Committee receives the report, it will begin working, in close consultation with Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, to determine whether to bring articles of impeachment to the House floor, and what those articles ought to be. “I think if we’re going to go down the road to formal articles of impeachment,” Lieu said, “that we would do it before the end of the year.”

Democrats, for now, are being careful not to say anything too specific about what they expect in the coming weeks. In the two months since the whistle-blower complaint was delivered to Capitol Hill, the Democrats have deposed seventeen witnesses, and they have assembled a strikingly robust factual record of what happened in Kyiv and in Washington this summer. But the price of this remarkable pace is abandoning the luxury of extended planning: the forward-looking horizon of the Democrats and staff members working on the impeachment inquiry has lately been measured in days, not months. As a judicial-committee aide told me on Saturday, “So much of all of this is still being decided on. There’s nothing certain.”