The Senate Has a Duty

Photo: saul loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The House impeached Trump. The other house needs to hold a trial.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to withhold the House articles of impeachment from the Senate, further trivializing a serious constitutional power and process. Senate Republicans seem content to play along while ridiculing her gambit, but they should take their own duties more seriously and hold a trial.

One emerging dodge seems to be that President Trump isn’t formally impeached until the articles are transmitted to the Senate. This is absurd. The House voted on two articles and passed them with a majority. The House broadcast this fact to the country along with more-in-sorrow-than-anger claims that they are doing their solemn constitutional duty.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says impeachment requires a formal transmittal of the articles to the Senate, whether by sedan chair or overnight FedEx, or that the House must appoint impeachment managers. The parchment merely says the House has sole power over impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try an impeachment. The act of impeachment is the vote.

The Founders also defined impeachment as consisting of two parts—the House vote followed by a Senate trial. They are two stages of the same process. The Founders gave the first impeachment step to the House knowing it would often be governed by populist and partisan passions.

They gave the Senate control over the trial as a check on the House. They knew the Senate, with its two Members per state, would represent the different interests of varied states. And with staggered elections every six years, two thirds of the Senate wouldn’t face immediate re-election after a trial and vote.

This means the current Senate has a responsibility to fulfill its part of the Constitution’s impeachment duty as a check on the partisan excesses of the Pelosi House. This isn’t merely to give Mr. Trump a chance to defend himself and be acquitted of the House charges. The more important obligation is to the separation of powers and to the Senate itself.

Read the rest from the WSJ's Editorial Board HERE.

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