To understand what Democrats are trying to achieve in the first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday, just look at how they structured it.

The first witnesses, acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent, will testify in the enormous Ways and Means Committee room Wednesday morning, but the committee they will be appearing before is the Intelligence Committee. In the legislation that 232 Democrats (and zero Republicans) passed two weeks ago, laying out rules for the public stage of the hearing, the investigative portion of the impeachment inquiry was placed in the Intelligence Committee’s hands. Though that committee’s reputation as the most bipartisan and professional on the House side has taken a hit in recent years, it is still relatively free of the bomb throwers and charlatans known to humiliate committee work in either the Oversight or Judiciary committees.

After Taylor and Kent make their opening statements, the next 90 minutes, according to the impeachment resolution, will be split equally for questioning between the committee chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, and its ranking member, Rep. Devin Nunes. These are much longer periods of questioning for the respective leaders than are common. There’s another twist: Schiff and Nunes may yield portions of their questioning time only to staff, and not to other members. Schiff, at least, has said that he intends to devote plenty of his 45 minutes to staff.

This setup reflects a strategy from Democrats to depoliticize, and depoliticianize, the impeachment process as it goes live before the public. Between witness opening statements and leaders’ questioning, the first couple of hours of this hearing—i.e., the part before the public’s attention begins to wane—will only allow for two politicians to speak. The idea is to allow the two star witnesses, who each delivered critical testimony that President Donald Trump linked federal aid to Ukraine’s willingness to announce investigations into “Clinton” and “Biden,” to tell their stories without interference. It is a persuasion strategy that, if done correctly, would allow impeachment-curious Republican viewers to forget, if only for a few minutes, that they’re watching an investigation run by House Democrats.

Republicans want these hearings, and the impeachment inquiry generally, to devolve into the strictly partisan food fight that we’re accustomed to seeing in matters of congressional oversight. They did not want the investigation to be conducted by the Intelligence Committee; they wanted it to be in the Judiciary Committee, where a senior Democratic member might eat a bucket of fried chicken during proceedings and make a fool of his party. They wanted the ability to yield large chunks of time, such as their initial 45 minutes, to their most ferocious cross-examiners, rather than leaving it in the hands of Nunes, who has not been the GOP conference’s point person in defending the president (in this investigation).

In the past week, in preparation for the hearings, the Republicans have tried to at least make the Intelligence Committee a wee bit more like the Judiciary Committee. Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy decided to place Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, one of the president’s loudest and most dedicated allies, on the Intelligence Committee, swapping him in for Arkansas Rep. Rick Crawford. (Crawford will get his committee seat back, McCarthy said, when this “Democratic charade” is over.) Republicans also considered adding two other fierce presidential defenders, Reps. Mark Meadows and Lee Zeldin, to the panel, but switching out two more members would have been too difficult a task.

Going out of one’s way to maximize the face time of a hyperpartisan like Jim Jordan in a high-stakes public hearing is not a persuasion strategy. It’s not how you create a consensus view among the public that Trump admirably discharged his duties in conducting foreign policy with Ukraine. The arguments Republicans have marshaled in the president’s defense, neatly compiled in this 18-page memo, rest on generous readings of the president’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and on Trump’s inability to fulfill the solicited quid pro quo, along with especially generous context about how it was understandable for Trump to dislike Ukraine. They’re the sort of arguments you have Jim Jordan make on camera and distribute to rank-and-file members so they’ll have something to say to reporters. It’s a strategy for sealing off defections as the American people hear directly, for the first time, from two senior foreign policy hands about corruption in the White House.

The dueling goals of the public hearings, then, are for Democrats to try to shift public opinion further in their favor and for Republicans to try to keep it polarized; Democrats will try to depoliticize the inquiry while Republicans maintain its politicization. We’ll find out who’s more effective by the number of further hearings Democrats decide to hold after this round.