If you thought the past two years of inquiries into possible misbehavior by Trumpworld were brutal, brace yourself. Phase 2 is about to heat up.

On Monday, the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee announced a wide-ranging inquiry into “the alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates and members of his administration.”

Citing two years of “near-daily attacks on our basic legal, ethical and constitutional rules and norms” by the president, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee’s chairman, asserted that, while it was important to respect the continuing criminal investigations, Congress “cannot rely on others to do the investigative work for us.” With Republican lawmakers having abdicated their oversight duties when they controlled the House, Mr. Nadler said, Democrats must now “begin building the public record.”

As its opening move, Mr. Nadler’s committee has sent requests for documents to 81 individuals and entities associated with Mr. Trump, including Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Hope Hicks, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. The now-defunct Trump Foundation is on the list, as is the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign, the White House and the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee. Also, David Pecker, the president’s close friend and chairman of the parent company of The National Enquirer.

Look for the next several months to be a nonstop pageant of subpoenas, hearings and court challenges.

Mr. Nadler’s panel is not alone in looking to impose accountability on a devious and dishonest president. But his investigation is special in at least one regard. As students of Congress — or of presidential scandals — can tell you, the House Judiciary Committee is where impeachment proceedings are born. And the areas on which Mr. Nadler will focus — obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuse of power — are precisely the sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors on which such cases are built.

Not that Mr. Nadler is raring to impeach. Many Democrats worry that an attempt to remove the president could prompt a political backlash, and no one wants to repeat what happened in 1998, when House Republicans’ obsessive pursuit of President Bill Clinton contributed to the party taking an electoral beating.

Even as he prepared to start this investigation, Mr. Nadler sought to tamp down expectations. “Impeachment is a long way down the road,” he said Sunday in an ABC News interview.

Political investigations tend to be marathons rather than sprints, requiring the slow, meticulous accretion of evidential layers. It’s easy to forget how slowly and painfully the Watergate investigation unfolded. It was more than a year after John Dean’s congressional testimony that President Richard Nixon resigned. With his investigation, Mr. Nadler is looking to build a case for impeachment so compelling that it will have enough bipartisan support to survive the Republican-controlled Senate. Barring that, his investigation will serve to keep the heat on Mr. Trump, and perhaps keep the Democratic base at least somewhat placated, as the next election approaches.

Mr. Nadler is right to telegraph restraint. This weekend, Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, said of Mr. Nadler’s inquiry: “I think Congressman Nadler decided to impeach the president the day the president won the election.”

Mr. Trump cavalierly dismissed the sweeping document request at a White House luncheon with the North Dakota State Bison football team on Monday. “I cooperate all the time with everybody,” he said. “You know the beautiful thing — no collusion. It’s all a hoax.”

Saturday, in a two-hour speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump offered a more pungent take on his tormentors, using a vulgarity to describe the special counsel inquiry and calling the investigations “collusion delusion.”

But his core message remains the same: The president is perfectly content to burn down the nation to save his own hide.

It is unclear what new crimes or abuses Mr. Nadler’s investigation might reveal. No matter how determined, Democrats in Congress lag far behind both the special counsel’s office and the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York. Yet the House still has a vital role to play in educating the public on the legal and ethical questions spiraling around this president.

And there is much to illuminate, despite Mr. Trump’s repeated assertion that, absent hard evidence of his having directly colluded with Russia to subvert an American election, he can declare vindication. Just last week, in his testimony about Mr. Trump before the House Oversight Committee, Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime fixer and personal lawyer, detailed accusations of sleaziness and potential criminality that included tax fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. Little of what Mr. Cohen shared was new, but it was important nonetheless, allowing the public its first opportunity to hear someone with intimate knowledge run through the catalog of the president’s shameless and lawless behavior.

Look for Mr. Nadler’s effort to bring many more such brutal spectacles as he seeks to build his case. This is what oversight looks like. It is not for the faint of heart.

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