On May 16th, Representative Al Green, as he has many times since 2017, stood on the House floor to implore his colleagues to initiate impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump, this time with a copy of the Mueller report in hand and an American-flag tie on his collar.

“Since [the report’s] release, we have had many persons, many of whom are members of this august body, say that they have concluded that the President has committed impeachable acts,” Green said. “Some have gone so far as to say he should be impeached. I’m one of them. We also have hundreds of lawyers, many of whom are prosecutors and former prosecutors, say that if anyone else committed the offenses outlined in this document, the Mueller report, that person would be arrested and prosecuted.”

“Hence,” he continued, “one can logically conclude that since this document addresses acts by the President, and since the President is not being prosecuted—since the House of Representatives has not moved to impeach the President—one can conclude that the President is, indeed now for some twenty-nine days, above the law.”

Although most Democratic leaders and most House Democrats continue to resist calls for impeachment, more and more prominent Democrats, out of frustration with the Administration’s refusal to coöperate with the House’s investigators, are inching away from the Party line—either in support of impeachment on its own merits or in support of beginning impeachment hearings as a legal strategy to sustain subpoena requests.

In both cases, the Mueller report’s description of ten actions by President Trump that may have constituted obstruction of justice is central to their argument. But there are other arguments for impeaching Trump—ones that Democrats, even those most critical of the President’s conduct in office, are curiously reluctant to make.

“I think the strongest case is his bigotry and policy,” Green told me in a recent conversation. “We shouldn’t allow a bigot to continue to hold the highest office in the land. We hear people daily on television who call him a racist, a bigot, who say he’s unfit—people in his own party have said he’s unfit to be the President. And the people of this country gave Democrats an overwhelming majority.”

“I just don’t see how we can have this overwhelming majority understand that he is a bigot—that he has infused his bigotry into policy—and not at some point decide that there ought to be a vote to impeach him for the bigotry and policy,” Green continued. “And, by the way, you don’t need to conduct hearings on this, because the President does it in plain view! It’s out there!”

In two impeachment resolutions—in December, 2017, and January, 2018—Green gave evidence: Trump’s efforts to block immigration and travel from Muslim-majority countries, his ban on transgender people serving in the military, his remarks about “very fine people” among the white-nationalist demonstrators in Charlottesville, and his complaint about immigrants coming from “shithole countries.” “In all of this,” Green’s January resolution closes, “the aforementioned Donald John Trump has, by his statements, brought the high office of President of the United States in contempt, ridicule, disgrace and disrepute, has sown discord among the people of the United States, has demonstrated that he is unfit to be President, and has betrayed his trust as President of the United States to the manifest injury of the people of the United States, and has committed a high misdemeanor in office.”

Green’s preferred rationale for impeachment—bigotry—is grounded in the history of the process. The first Presidential impeachment, Andrew Johnson’s, in 1868, centered on Johnson’s violation of a law called the Tenure of Office Act. But the actual impetus for the impeachment effort, as Brenda Wineapple notes in a new book on the episode, “The Impeachers,” was Johnson’s leniency toward Southerners intent on preserving white supremacy and thwarting Reconstruction.

“There were people who wanted that man impeached because they really thought he was hindering and betraying the cause of the war,” Wineapple told me. “They were outraged because he was restoring the country to what it was, and they had a vision of the future—what it could be.”

That moral conflict was sublimated into a fight over the Tenure of Office Act, which Republican majorities in Congress had passed, over Johnson’s veto, in an effort to prevent Johnson from firing the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who was then implementing Reconstruction and supported aggressive measures. Johnson ultimately fired Stanton in early 1868, and most of the articles of impeachment are directly related to this dismissal. But the procedural case that emerged against Johnson was preceded by broader indictments of his conduct.

“One of the so-called Radical Republicans called for Johnson’s impeachment early in 1867, and the actual vote on impeachment didn’t happen for almost a year,” Wineapple said. “So impeachment had been in the minds of several of the Radical Republicans early on precisely because of the way they interpreted the Constitution and the conditions for impeachment. And they interpreted it broadly—the abuse of power. He had obstructed Congress. But there was nothing that was an actual legal misdemeanor or what could be called a high crime or high misdemeanor.”

That changed once Johnson finally dismissed Stanton. But, as Green noted in our conversation, the eleven articles of impeachment passed by the House against Johnson went beyond his violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The tenth quoted at length from speeches Johnson that had made in a raucous tour to shore up his Presidency, including one in which he accused Republicans of having provoked the New Orleans Massacre of 1866, in which forty-four African-Americans were killed by white Democrats. “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skins, and they are responsible for it,” Johnson said. With such comments, the tenth article charged that Johnson, “unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof,” had attempted “to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States.”

Johnson was not removed from office. It is highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Senate Republicans would ever vote to remove Trump. The Democrats have pursued an intensely legalistic approach to confronting the Trump Administration, in a quixotic hope that enough damning objective evidence might be found to force Republican voters and Republicans in Congress to acknowledge the President’s wrongdoing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as much in March: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that, unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path.”

But the fact that an impeachment absent Republican support would be divisive and lead to Trump’s acquittal does not mean that impeachment would be futile. The ultimate judges of the evidence presented in a trial would be the American people, not the President’s apologists, who would be forced, during an election season, to defend conduct that the majority of the public might find indefensible. We can see impeachment in the way that many Democrats have been framing it—as a legal process analogous to a trial in the criminal-justice system, where the outcomes are respected because the process is considered impartial—or we can see it, instead, for what it really is: a quasi-legal but ultimately political, and perhaps moral, exercise.

Additionally, the fear that impeachment may weary voters and cause a backlash that might ultimately help Trump does not seem to be terribly well founded. Two months ago, before the release of the Barr letter, before the release of the Mueller report, and before triumphant hoots of vindication on the collusion charge from the President and his allies, Trump’s average approval rating in polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight was at just over forty-two per cent. It is now at forty-one per cent. If it was true that constant coverage of Democratic investigations and claims of exoneration from the President would bolster his standing in an impeachment process, one might expect those things to have boosted his numbers somewhat already. They have not.

Politics aside, there is also for Democrats the possibly naïve and certainly quaint question of whether impeaching Trump—a President potentially implicated in obstruction of justice by a special counsel’s investigation, regularly accused of racism and bigotry, and characterized even by conservatives as unfit for the Presidency in various other ways—is the right thing to do, and if it’s worthwhile, even if it seems politically unpopular. That’s a question that historians of our political moment and the generations ahead are sure to take an interest in, even if the Democratic Party does not.

The designer Giorgia Lupi was born in 1981 and believes that she is part of a special bridge generation. “I was raised in a completely analog environment,” she says. “I was a teen-ager when all of the awkward connection and human connection needed to be made in real life. But, at the same time, because I started to use technology as a teen-ager, I’m fluent in both worlds.” This week, Lupi joins the graphic-design firm Pentagram as the only partner who has a focus on information design. Her work, consistent with her upbringing, brings a tactile feel to computer code, and her appointment is an occasion to assess information design—a field located between graphic design and data science—and the possibilities it holds.

Sitting in Pentagram’s crisp quarters, on Park Avenue South, Lupi cuts an extremely organized figure: petite and black-clad, with a looping black necklace and round black glasses, accented by a cap of red hair. Born in Modena, Italy, and trained as an architect, Lupi had her first brush with information design while in college via an exercise in urban mapping, inspired by the planner Kevin Lynch. In his landmark book, “The Image of the City,” published in 1961, Lynch asked people to draw their city for a visitor, paying attention to their own everyday paths and major landmarks, without reference to geography. Of course, each person’s map, both in Lynch’s book and Lupi’s exercise, was different—but that did not mean that one map was more accurate than another. Rather, each person was telling a different story through cartography.

Today, Lupi describes her profession as “telling stories with data,” which sounds like an oxymoron, until you see her work. For the Milan Design Triennial, Lupi and her previous design studio, Accurat, created a so-called data tapestry, made up of horizontal bands crosshatched with vertical lines, that wraps around three sides of a gallery, titled “The Room of Change.” Each horizontal band represents a different data set, ranging from world population to animal extinctions, alcohol consumption, and technology access. Each vertical slice represents a moment in time. The wow factor comes when you step back and realize that all those numbers—all that data—look from afar like the sketch for a Bauhaus tapestry, done in colored pencil. The installation works as both visual art and a narrative of environmental decline.

Lupi calls what she does “data humanism,” a reaction against the computer-generated, harsh-toned bar graphs, pie charts, and rows of tiny humans that leapt from corporate reports into mainstream media in the nineties. In a manifesto of sorts that was published in Print magazine, Lupi writes how “ ‘cool’ infographics promised us the key to master this untamable complexity.” When that did not work out, “we were left with gigabytes of unreadable 3D pie charts and cheap translucent user interfaces full of widgets.” The ostensibly neutral visual language of these graphics suggested authority, but they could easily mislead or be misread. What was needed was a more honest, approachable, graspable way to present data.

Many people outside of the design world first encountered Lupi’s work through a side project: her year-long correspondence with the London-based data designer Stefanie Posavec, “a friendship in 52 weeks of postcards,” collected in the 2016 book “Dear Data.” When Lupi and Posavec met, they realized that they had a common interest in collecting, organizing, and, most of all, drawing. But Lupi lived in New York, and Posavec in London. They decided to get to know each other better through their preferred medium, data. Each week for a year, they set themselves a new research question: How often did they give or receive compliments? How many times did they check their phones daily? How many dresses were in their closets? They logged that information and then drew it on a postcard and sent it across the Atlantic.

There’s really no better evocation of data humanism than a flip through the book. The two women’s data are visualized as carefully drawn flowers, asterisks, and whorls. It’s touchable in a way that the bossy bar chart has rarely been. Lupi believes that collecting and visualizing your own data is a form of empowerment. The corporations and Internet companies that take information from us should be encouraged to share it, so that we, too, can use it. “Ultimately, data is human made,” Lupi says. “Actually, I don’t like to talk about data in singular. To me data is plural.” In Lupi’s hands, data can have personality, shape, warmth. Her increasing prominence (which includes the obligatory stop on the TED stage) has created its own hand-drawn trend in the field of information design. Her work speaks to a generation that is overwhelmed by input, that wants to tame the surveillance state and make it understandable. For a Gen Xer like me, Lupi’s craft aesthetic makes the comprehension of data seem more possible, but I can also see myself being lulled into a false sense of security when my online shopping habits are rendered as pastel flowers.

But my attention snags on the question of power: Who really controls the data and how they get displayed? For example, the Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs is planning a new, smart neighborhood, in Toronto, and critics are concerned about what it will mean, datawise, to walk its sidewalks. The same sensors that tell a smart streetlight that you are waiting to cross are tracking your location. How does one opt in to a neighborhood? Lupi doesn’t really want to touch the question of when data should or shouldn’t be collected. Like most information designers, she works in the space between that collection and the public. Her interest is in levelling understanding, so that we citizens can have access to, and develop an imagination about, all the information that’s already being collected. This could extend even to the gatekeeping: If Apple’s terms of service, say, were more intuitive, more designed, would we actually read them? What if, she suggests, there were tiny visualizations in the wall of text, guiding us through the legal maze?

Two of Lupi’s upcoming projects do, in fact, grapple with the questions of power and how data visualization might help, in different ways. Her next book, currently in the proposal stage, intends to function as a way “to rethink our relationship with the data we consume and produce.” She’s hoping that the book will appeal to the same audience as her TED talk: younger adults who would like to understand both the biases and the potential of information design. She’s also working with The New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman on a database that documents cases of asylum seekers who were deported and then killed upon return to their home countries, building on Stillman’s reporting. “After the piece was published, she received many requests to actually publish a database of these stories,” Lupi says. Through this project,” the general public will understand the human toll that immigration policies will have, but, at the same time, we’re building a searchable database that can be expanded for immigration lawyers or people who need to access all of this information for the greater good.” Data, humanity, shaking hands.

In the summer of 2016, Rachael Denhollander was scrolling through Facebook at her home in Louisville, Kentucky, when she happened upon the cover story of the day’s Indianapolis Star. It was an investigation into U.S.A. Gymnastics, one of the nation’s most prominent Olympic organizations, concluding that for years the federation’s top officials had mishandled allegations of sexual abuse. Denhollander, a lawyer, a devout Christian, and a mother of four, had competed as a gymnast during her high-school years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as she explains on “Believed,” a podcast from Michigan Radio and NPR that was released last fall. In 2000, when she was fifteen, her mother managed to nab her physical-therapy sessions with Larry Nassar, the celebrated physician for the women’s national team. During their visits to his clinic, Nassar would drape a sheet over Denhollander’s body and, standing so as to obstruct his movements from her mother, slip his hands beneath the teen-ager’s bra and shorts. Denhollander eventually told her mother about Nassar’s actions; both women agreed that no one would believe a club-level athlete from Kalamazoo over an Olympic doctor. Over the next sixteen years, though, Denhollander assembled her own makeshift case file, saving diary entries from her youth alongside medical records from her visits to Nassar, notes from her therapist, and research from pelvic-rehabilitation practitioners about the proper protocol of the doctor’s invasive treatments. When Denhollander finished reading the Indy Star article, she noticed that it included the number of a tip line.

It wasn’t until the next month, when Denhollander went public with her story, in a follow-up article in the Indy Star, that law enforcement started to take action against Nassar. Since 1997, Nassar’s employer, Michigan State University, had received complaints about him from numerous women, all of which were eventually dismissed. In 2014, during a Title IX investigation that ended up clearing Nassar of wrongdoing, he sat in a cramped interview room at the university’s police department and defended the integrity of his medical treatments. “I do this on a regular basis,” he insisted, suggesting that if he ever “did something wrong,” the news would spread “like wildfire.” Nassar’s crimes did not capture national attention until January of 2018, when more than a hundred women, including the two-time Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman, testified against him at a live-streamed sentencing hearing in Michigan. He is now serving forty to a hundred and seventy-five years in prison, in large part because of those testimonies. Media coverage during the trial emphasized the collective courage of his victims, whose cathartic, excoriating chorus coincided with the height of the #MeToo movement. In the time since Nassar’s imprisonment, a number of journalistic investigations—among them “Believed,” the podcast, and “At the Heart of Gold,” a new HBO documentary by Erin Lee Carr—have shifted the public’s focus to the stories of his lesser-known victims, exposing the culture that enabled Nassar’s abuse from the perspective of those who dared to come forward first.

Carr’s best-known documentaries, including “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and “I Love You, Now Die,” have brought context and clarity to true-crime narratives of abuse. She began filming “At the Heart of Gold” in 2017, consulting journalists who had covered early reports of Nassar’s transgressions and travelling to Michigan to interview his survivors themselves. The subjects of Carr’s film are athletes who range in age from their teens to their thirties. They often appear on screen beside their mothers, describing with preternatural composure the admiration they once felt for Nassar. Many of them recall the doctor as a “friend,” a “confidant,” a “guardian angel,” a “God-fearing Catholic man,” or, at the least, a kindly foil to the coaches who worked them to exhaustion. Chatty and personable, Nassar smuggled candy to gymnasts during gruelling practice sessions, disbursing single Skittles from his duffel bag. He iced their bruises and taped up their shin splints. He lent them his cell phone when theirs were prohibited at a remote training camp in Texas. He brought back gifts from his stints at international competitions: water bottles, Olympic jackets, photographs signed by stars of the sport. “At the Heart of Gold” examines the misplaced trust that allowed so many children to rationalize their own suffering. Trinea Gonczar, a former gymnast whose lawyers estimate that she was molested eight hundred and forty-six times, used to justify Nassar’s treatment with reasoning that now sounds like a perversion of the #MeToo movement’s rallying cry. “He does that to me all the time,” Gonczar remembers reassuring teammates who confided in her. “You’re good. You don’t have to worry. It’s not weird. You’re not the only one.”

For decades, Nassar’s status allowed him to exploit the physical contact essential to his profession. One of the most disturbing sequences in “At the Heart of Gold” is a montage of gymnastics highlights from years past. In each snippet, Nassar appears on the sidelines as an unassuming figure in a polo shirt—practically invisible to the casual viewer until summoned to action during crises on the floor. He was there in Atlanta, at the 1996 Summer Olympics, reaching a hand behind the injured Kerri Strug as her coaches carried her toward a stretcher. He was there in Boston, at the 2000 Olympic trials, helping Shannon Miller to her feet after a weak block off the vault scuttled her attempt to qualify for the Sydney Games. Carr’s documentary also includes grainy excerpts of instructional videos that Nassar recorded to model his techniques. They show Nassar moving his palms in swift, assured motions over many anonymous bodies, demonstrating how to knead the muscles under leotards and cinch Kinesio tape around the upper thighs. It was these videos, along with a series of PowerPoints Nassar presented at medical conferences, that he used to legitimize his treatments on the rare occasions when authorities decided to question him.

Not all of Nassar’s abuse, in the end, could be justified as medical treatment. The finale of Carr’s film features the testimony of Kyle Stephens, who grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. Her parents were close friends of the Nassars. In the late nineties, they congregated at the doctor’s house for weekly Sunday dinners. As the adults cooked upstairs, Nassar would offer to entertain Stephens and her brother in his basement, where he’d initiate games of hide and seek to separate the children before masturbating in front of Stephens. On other occasions, he molested her beneath a blanket as they all watched television on the couch. The abuse began when Stephens was six or seven. After six years, Stephens told her parents, but they did not believe her. Her father demanded she apologize to Nassar; the ensuing conflict eventually estranged her from her family. On “Believed,” which includes interviews with Stephens, she recalls that it was Nassar who phoned her at college to inform her that her father had suffered a stroke. In 2016, after reading Rachael Denhollander’s story in the Indy Star, Stephens finally called the police, who were able to obtain a search warrant for Nassar’s house. What they discovered there—thirty-seven thousand images and videos of child pornography, on several external hard drives stuffed in the trash—allowed them to make an arrest.

Since Carr wrapped filming, last year, U.S.A Gymnastics has continued to contend with the fallout of the Nassar scandal. The organization has appointed four presidents since 2017. The most recent, a sports executive and former gymnast named Li Li Leung, left a post at the N.B.A. to take the job in March, out of a “personal calling.” So far, her handling of the issue has instilled little confidence. Last month, on the “Today” show, she described seeing Nassar for clearance on an injured knee when she was sixteen years old. He was not able to abuse her then because her coach was present, she explained, revealing a profound ignorance of the circumstances around much of Nassar’s abuse. (She has since apologized, sort of, acknowledging that her comment might have seemed “insensitive to the survivors and their families.”) Earlier this month, Leung announced the hiring of Edward Nyman, the organization’s first full-time director of sports medicine and science; the next day, U.S.A. Gymnastics reversed course, citing an unspecified “conflict of interest.” It was later revealed that Nyman had failed to disclose allegations of misconduct against a gym owned by his wife and that he is facing misconduct allegations of his own. (Both Nyman and his wife have denied the charges against them.)

The sport’s top athletes, meanwhile, continue to serve as fierce advocates against abuse, in gymnastics and beyond. In April, Raisman joined students from the University of Southern California in a rally, at the state capitol, supporting a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for sexual-misconduct allegations against doctors at student-health centers. Dozens of the women there were victims of George Tyndall, a former gynecologist at U.S.C. who, in 2017, was allowed to retire quietly, with a financial package, after a nurse reported him to the campus rape-crisis center. Tyndall’s first victims, like Nassar’s, had come forward as early as the nineties. By the time the Los Angeles Police Department announced an investigation, the list of his accusers had grown to include hundreds.

It’s a sad day in America when the most appropriate thing to say is the line often misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” When basic rights are under attack from the government, the arguments that are called for are neither original nor subtle. On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that it was charging the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, for his connection to the leak of some seven hundred and fifty thousand confidential military and diplomatic documents, in 2010. The indictment of Assange is an offensive on the First Amendment that is as banal as it is blunt.

Let’s get the “I disapprove” part out of the way first. Assange is a fundamentally unappealing protagonist. He keeps terrible political company. He is, apparently, terrible company himself. In his writing and interviews, he comes across as power-crazed and manipulative. Most important, when he published leaked classified documents, he shared information that exposed people to danger. He is the perfect target precisely because he is unsympathetic. One has to hold one’s nose while defending Assange—and yet one must defend Assange.

The use of the Espionage Act to prosecute Assange is an attack on the First Amendment. Carrie DeCell, an attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute, summed up the threat in a Twitter thread on Thursday. “The government argues that Assange violated the Espionage Act by soliciting, obtaining, and then publishing classified information,” she wrote. “That’s exactly what good national security and investigative journalists do every day.”

The government has argued that Assange is not a journalist. Most journalists would probably agree: the indiscriminate publication of classified information (or any other information, for that matter), with neither a narrative nor regard for people’s safety, is not journalism in any conventional understanding of the word. But journalism—unlike, say, medicine, law, or architecture—is a profession that any person can practice. There are no licensing or education requirements, and we journalists generally think that this is a good thing: the public can decide which journalists are worth reading or watching, and the law can intervene in those rare cases when journalism causes harm. The last thing we want the U.S. government, or any government, to do is to start deciding who is and who is not a journalist. “For the most part, the charges against him broadly address the solicitation, receipt, and publication of classified information,” DeCell tweeted. “These charges could be brought against national security and investigative journalists simply for doing their jobs, and doing them well.”

Like many Trumpian attacks on democracy, this one is novel but rooted in a long devolution of American institutions—it is a leap, but from a running start. Government use of law against speech goes back at least to the George W. Bush Administration. Prosecutions ramped up under Barack Obama. Prosecutions, however, focussed on whistleblowers and leakers; journalists, who, like the Times reporter James Risen, could be called up as witnesses, were targeted indirectly. But journalism has not been collateral damage in this battle—it has been the target. The Trump Administration has made that clear by jumping the fence that the Obama Administration had merely approached and charging Assange, under the Espionage Act, for practices typical of journalists.

It stands to reason that an Administration that considers the press an “enemy of the people” would launch this attack. In attacking the media, it is attacking the public. The First Amendment, after all, doesn’t exist to protect the right of Assange, or me, or anyone else to say whatever we want. It exists to protect the public’s access to whatever we have to say, should the public find it of interest.