If your only source of information about Capitol Hill last week was cable news, I forgive you for believing that all non-impeachment work in Congress had screeched to a halt, that Republicans and Democrats were at each other's throats, and that Congress itself had reached an ugly new low.
But if you had looked away from your screen and walked the halls of the House and Senate instead, you would have seen the rest of the story playing out away from television cameras and media scrums — member meetings, committee hearings and real, bipartisan agreements on long-stalled issues being struck at the very moment that impeachment seemed to be swallowing Washington whole.
It's not what most people expected to happen when the House began the work of removing the president from office. And it's certainly not what Donald Trump had in mind in his State of the Union speech in January when he warned the House chamber not to come for him if they wanted to get anything done this year.
"If there is going to peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation," he said. "It just doesn't work that way!"
But it turns out, it does work that way. In fact, staffers I spoke with last week said the entire impeachment spectacle has had the strange side effect of allowing, and even incentivizing, the kinds of compromises that members might otherwise never have been able to strike.
One look at last week's calendar tells the story. Just hours before the House Judiciary Committee began to mark up its articles of impeachment, Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the second-ranking Democrat on the committee, was on the House floor watching her Farm Workforce Modernization Act pass with all Democrats and 34 Republicans voting yes.
Among the ayes for the bill, which would give legal status and a path to citizenship for much-needed farmworkers, were Reps. Devin Nunes of California and Elise Stefanik of New York, two of the Republican superstars from the House Intelligence Committee hearings defending the president.
Also on Wednesday, the House passed the conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act, with a 12-week paid family leave benefit for federal workers that is the first expansion of federal leave policies since the Family and Medical Leave Act passed in 1993.