Colorado’s two U.S. senators split Wednesday on the most historic votes of their political careers: whether to convict and remove from office the president of the United States.

Republican Sen. Cory Gardner voted to acquit President Donald Trump on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet voted to convict. Trump was acquitted on both counts.

Gardner, a Yuma Republican, announced about an hour before the votes that he would support acquittal, but did not say whether the president’s actions were appropriate.

In a speech on the Senate floor and a phone interview soon after, the senator said the Trump case was about whether the government can investigate how tax dollars are spent, not about the president’s withholding of military aid to coerce Ukraine to investigate a political rival.

“The question before us is whether or not a policy question can be grounds for impeachment. The policy question is, can the president be impeached for looking at how taxpayer dollars are being spent? I simply don’t think that’s true,” Gardner said in the Denver Post interview, after he was asked twice whether Trump acted inappropriately in his dealings with Ukraine.

“What we did not see over the last two weeks was a conclusive reason to remove the president of the United States, an act that would nullify the 2016 election and rob roughly half the country of their preferred candidate for the 2020 election,” Gardner said on the Senate floor.

The senator, who faces re-election in November, criticized Democrats for requesting witnesses in the Senate’s trial of Trump, claiming Democrats’ case could not truly be overwhelming and airtight if they were asking that witnesses and further documents be subpoenaed.

“In their partisan — partisan — race to impeach, the House failed to do the fundamental work required to prove its case, to meet the heavy burden,” Gardner said.

Earlier in the afternoon, Bennet, a Denver Democrat, excoriated the Republican-controlled Senate, saying senators were failing a test to save American democracy.

Colorado’s senior senator, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Trump’s behavior was clearly unconstitutional and impeachable, but spent most of his time criticizing the Senate for voting last week not to call witnesses in its trial.

“It’s pitiful! It is disgraceful! And it will be a stain on this body for all time,” Bennet said, yelling on the Senate floor.

“We have become a body that does nothing. We’re an employment agency. That’s what we are. Seventy-five percent of the votes we took last year were on appointments,” he said, a statistic that he called “pathetic.”

Bennet spoke of his family’s history and the nation’s history, citing the Founding Fathers, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. The nation is imperfect and always has been, he said, but it was great because it was capable, at least in the past, of curing its imperfections. He questioned whether the Senate is capable of solving today’s problems in its current state.

“I say to the American people: Our democracy is very much at risk. I’m not one of those people who believes Donald Trump is the source of all our problems. I think he’s made matters much worse, to be sure, but he is a symptom of our problems. He is a symptom of our failure to tend to the democracy,” Bennet said.

“We are being asked to save the democracy, and we’re going to fail that test today in the United States Senate. My prayer for our country … is that the American people won’t fail that test. And I’m optimistic that we won’t. We’ve never failed it before, and I don’t think we’ll fail it in our time,” he said in closing.

Golden resident Steve Forgy, a 56-year-old CEO of a small company, told The Denver Post last week that any member of Congress who favored Trump’s removal from office should be removed from office themselves.

“I’d vote any of them supporting impeachment out. It’s a moot point, and it’s why I’m a big believer in term limits. I’m tired of all politicians not getting anything accomplished,” he said.

But Tuesday evening, about 130 protesters gathered in mid-20-degree weather outside the Byron Rogers Federal Building in downtown Denver to protest Trump’s acquittal. Among the signs: “45 is not above the law — shame on the GOP” and “We wanted a fair trial. We got a cover-up.”

“You can’t have a fair trial without witnesses and documents,” said Adrian Pulido, 24, of Denver. “So I feel like the American people are right to be mad about the outcome. They cut it off at the knees.”