In the wake of the killing of Renee Nicole Good, Congresswoman Robin Kelly has announced the filing of three articles of impeachment against Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. Predictably, reactions have been muted at best: with the GOP holding both the Senate and the House, impeachment can be dismissed as purely performative, a helpless response to an in and of itself understandable moral imperative of “just do something!”

But such dismissals are too quick: this administration has been running on a promise of impunity at all levels, and Democrats have to start signaling that actions have consequences. They also need to break out of a fateful dynamic: during Trump 2.0, misdeeds and scandals are following each other in such rapid succession that neither the press nor the public ever seem to get to focus on one. Impeachment can concentrate minds and slow down political time.

Of course, on one level it is obscene to make a senseless killing immediately subject to political calculations – what happened in Minneapolis is not a test of Machiavellian savviness, but of one’s capacity for compassion and decency. Trump’s sycophants have been failing it; they rushed into TV studios, spreading lies about Good’s conduct as well as her character, outdoing each other in blaming and smearing the victim. They have also effectively communicated that anyone deemed somehow to stand in the way of Stephen Miller’s will triumphing can be declared a “domestic terrorist” – and treated like the law no longer protected them at all.

As so often, JD Vance turned out to be

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