It’s ironic that one of the clearest explanations for why President Donald Trump should be impeached is coming from a member of his own party. Michigan Representative Justin Amash, a devout libertarian Republican, said this week that the Mueller report describes “impeachable crimes” on the president’s part. “Some of the president’s actions were inherently corrupt,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “Other actions were corrupt—and therefore impeachable—because the president took them to serve his own interests.”

Amash is the first Republican lawmaker in either chamber to publicly draw this conclusion. That speaks volumes about his colleagues, who have largely echoed the president’s up-is-down refrain that the report’s damning findings are a “total exoneration” of him. But it says more about Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats. Their strategy of describing Trump as a lawless threat to the republic while refusing to begin impeachment proceedings against him has gone from simply untenable to openly laughable.