By Ross K. Baker

When the impeachment managers from the House of Representatives ceremoniously delivers the folders with their two articles of impeachment to a Senate official, the job of the “People’s House” will have concluded and the momentous job of determining the fitness of the president to keep his job will fall to the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,” the U.S. Senate.

It is an institution that, in recent years, has shown itself incapable of doing much more than rubber-stamp nominations of judges and administration officials sent over from the White House. Especially since the election of Donald Trump, the chamber’s leadership has been more interested in protecting Republican senators from politically risky votes than voting on bills of national importance. Depending upon how its 100 members behave, the Senate will either confirm its irrelevance or set it on a new path of responsible and principled lawmaking. We will know in the next week few weeks.

One promising sign is the dismal reception by Republican senators to the proposal by one of its newest and most inexperienced members, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri that the Senate should dismiss the charges against Trump and cancel the trial because of the delay in the delivery in the articles of impeachment by the House. This idea that somehow Trump could be “unimpeached” by the Senate was considered so absurd by most of Hawley’s fellow Republicans that even his senior colleague from Missouri, Roy Blunt, dismissed it.

But it’s too early to get hopeful. The Senate has too often proven itself to be the graveyard of good legislation as evidenced by the obvious pride Majority Leader Mitch McConnell takes in in being called “the grim reaper” for matters other than stacking the federal courts to satisfy the fondest dreams of the Federalist Society.

Senators need to be reminded why the Founding Fathers gave them six-year terms and set the age of eligibility five years higher than that of the House: it was to give them political protection from immediate reprisal by an electorate displeased by some vote or statement and, it was hoped, to exercise maturity of judgment.

Currently, Republican senators cower in fear from the wrath of their constituents and their unshakable allegiance to Donald Trump. GOP senators up for re-election in 2020 might be granted some measure of consideration due to their fear of electoral doom, but almost two-thirds of their colleagues have nothing standing in the way of exercising impartial judgment on the president’s actions.

With Democratic senators appearing to stand fast in the ranks in favor of removing Trump, it falls to that very small numbers of Republican senators who are either on their way out the door or whose political futures are precarious because they represent swing states or, like Senators Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have long had issues with Trump, to steer the course of the trial.

And that is the way it has almost always been in this closely-divided Senate. But when one party enjoyed a comfortable majority, getting a few votes from across the aisle to pass a bill or to at least give it the color of bipartisan legitimacy was a familiar obstacle. Drawing on the meager reserves of courage or principle of a few men and women has always been a Senate story: Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey pleading for votes on background checks after Sandy Hook, John McCain riding to the last-minute rescue of the Affordable Care Act, or persuading Maine Senator Olympia Snow to give Obamacare the slightest tinge of bipartisanship in 2010, appealing to a handful colleagues to risk it is the story of the modern Senate.

The outcome for the Senate trial is probably a foregone conclusion and the president will not be removed from office, but the trial must not simply be an endorsement of his many actions that violate the spirit if not the actual letter of the Constitution. How the Senate arrives at its decision will, in many ways, be as important as the final verdict. The trial will certainly not be a kangaroo court, but it must also not be a hasty whitewash. It is in the hands of a very few senators—some of them politically-imperiled — to preserve the endangered reputation of the institution in which they serve.

Ross K. Baker is an author and distinguished professor at Rutgers University. He has been a research associate at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and a consultant to the Democratic caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives and a Scholar in Residence in the Office of the Democratic Leader of the U.S. Senate in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

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