Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s stupid, shocking and disgraceful remarks in Helsinki, we once again hear calls for his impeachment. Those calls will be disregarded: Clearly the Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, are not yet in any mood to heed them. They may never be, of course. In that case, American voters will have to deal with Mr. Trump the old-fashioned way, by blocking his re-election in 2020. In the meantime, of course, they dispose of a powerful means of hampering him by awarding those same houses of Congress to the Democrats this fall.

Prosaic, certainly, but that is how American representative democracy is supposed to work in all but the gravest constitutional crises. You suffer the leader you have elected until it comes time to deselect him and in the meantime leash him by exploiting the separation of powers. In which case, an adverse Congress does not impeach, it merely obstructs (and, where necessary and desirable, collaborates). That is the old way in American politics, and the better one; that’s how you proceed with minimum disruption. As the Republicans, having recaptured both the House and Senate under Barack Obama, mostly just outwaited him, so the Democrats would outwait Mr. Trump. If you get mad (as the Republicans did at Mr. Obama and the Democrats have at Mr. Trump), that’s how you get even.

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But don’t Mr. Trump’s remarks import a constitutional crisis? No. Stupid, shocking and disgraceful, as aforesaid – like so many other of his remarks. A step beyond those others, perhaps, but only an incremental one. Those most angered by them (apart from the intelligence services, of course) are those few honourable Republicans whom Mr. Trump has angered all along. Others in the party (Newt Gingrich, for example) have approached this episode as they have previous ones, in the spirit of damage control. Unsurprisingly, they remain committed to their party’s control of both the executive and the legislative branches, with the judicial one soon to follow. They won’t easily exchange a strong if deeply flawed President for a terminally weak one, thereby conceding the 2020 election to the Democrats. (Nor, needless to say, would the Democrats do so were they in the Republicans’ place.)

But don’t these remarks amount to high crimes and misdemeanours, the prescribed grounds for impeachment? Hardly. Stupid, shocking and disgraceful are of a lower order altogether. There’s nothing clearly criminal about his words. While a fulminating John Brennan (Mr. Obama’s CIA director) described them as “treasonous,” they certainly don’t meet the rigorous legal standard for that term.

No American President has ever been both impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. The feckless Andrew Johnson came close in 1869, narrowly failing of conviction, while similarly Bill Clinton in 1999, having been impeached by a House controlled by Republicans, was acquitted by a Senate in which the Democrats held enough seats to block the two-thirds vote required for conviction. In 1974 Richard Nixon resigned rather than face the disgrace of his party abandoning him over the barefaced criminality of Watergate. Each of these cases was very different from the others, and in each the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanours” assumed a very different colour. That there have been so few such cases attests to the commendable reluctance of American Congresses to invoke this nuclear option in pursuit of even the most keenly held partisan objectives.

Might Mr. Trump yet be impeached and convicted? Or might even he, brazen though he is, yet resign rather than face impeachment? You bet. But first the other shoe will have to drop, whether as a result of the Mueller investigation or the ongoing probe of Mr. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen. It will have to be shown that there was not only Russian interference in the election but collusion of the Trump campaign in it, or that Mr. Trump has committed some other still undisclosed high crime. The crucial word is “shown,” as opposed to merely rumoured. Until then, all talk of impeachment is merely an expression of that very hyper-partisanship that Mr. Trump delights to stoke. Cool it, fellow Trumpophobes; our day will come. (Even if only, as foreseen by the Constitution, at the polls.)