There was never much hope that Republican senators would vote in large enough numbers to remove President Donald Trump from office this week. So in his closing statement on Monday, California Representative Adam Schiff set his sights a little lower. “Every single vote, even a single vote by a single member, can change the course of history,” he told the chamber. “It is said that a single man or a woman of courage makes a majority. Is there one among you who will say ‘enough’?”

Utah Senator Mitt Romney was the only Republican who answered that call. In an emotional speech on the Senate floor hours before the vote, he said he would vote to convict Trump on the first article of impeachment, which charged him with abuse of power. “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine,” he declared. Romney explained that his decision came from more than just the facts at hand. “With my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me,” he said.

It was a profound moment in the Trump era. In some ways, Romney is more insulated from Trump’s political reprisals than any other Republican lawmaker. (He is not up for reelection until 2024.) But more than anything else, it showed how the Senate, as both an institution and a group of elected officials, failed in its constitutional duty. Laid before it was one of the plainest cases of corruption and abuse of power ever uncovered against a sitting president. In acquitting the president, the Senate has only convicted itself.

Forty-seven senators found the president guilty on both charges, falling substantially short of the two-thirds majority necessary to convict him and remove him from office. Fifty-two senators found the president not guilty on both charges. They voted largely along partisan lines. Romney, who sharply criticized Trump’s coercion of Ukraine when the scandal emerged, voted to convict him of abuse of power and acquit him of obstruction of Congress.

The House’s managers, led by California Representative Adam Schiff, spent the last few weeks recounting Trump’s misdeeds. They laid out in stark detail how the president and his underlings tried to coerce a vulnerable eastern European country into falsely smearing former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading Democratic presidential candidate last summer. A whistleblower complaint alerted Congress to the scheme in September, effectively forcing Trump to release millions in military aid that he planned to withhold until Ukraine’s president publicly tarred Biden as corrupt. It was the most egregious abuse of presidential power since Watergate, and the House managers prosecuted it accordingly.