In a chamber accustomed to carefully scripted outrage, Al Green’s words cut through like an alarm at 3 a.m.—too jarring to ignore, too unsettling to fully process. He described not a hypothetical danger, but a present erosion: institutions fraying each time intimidation went unanswered, each time violent language was excused as “just politics.” His “countdown to impeachment” was less about a single man than about a nation running out of chances to correct its own drift.

The reactions outside were loud, but the most important response was the quiet one: people asking themselves whether they had mistaken constant chaos for normalcy. Green’s speech left no easy heroes, no tidy villains—only a stark choice between confronting the slow unraveling or learning to live with it. The real impact wasn’t measured in votes that day, but in how many listeners could no longer pretend they hadn’t been warned.