Impeaching the president is a grave matter. It should be undertaken only gravely and after great reflection.

Democrats didn’t have time for that, so instead, Nancy Pelosi just wore black and tried to shush her party’s raucous cheers.

Let's face it: Democrats have been planning to impeach Donald Trump since he won the presidency. They hoped they would get some good dirt, and not without reason. Trump has consistently failed to separate his business and personal interests from his public office. But they never found a high crime or misdemeanor, so they impeached him with whatever they could find.

We believe that Trump misused the power of the presidency when he tried to utilize foreign aid to coax Ukraine’s president into announcing an investigation of the Bidens. He “deployed the United States’ diplomatic capital to advance a partisan political agenda,” we wrote in September.

Republican congressmen, to their discredit, almost unanimously defended Trump’s actions toward Ukraine as perfectly fine. They weren’t perfectly fine.

But not every presidential misdeed is impeachable. Every president abuses power. There’s almost no precedent for impeaching a president (it’s now happened only three times in history, and the first one was clearly a farce), and so it’s hard to know when abuse of power warrants impeachment.

But here’s one easy test: Did Congress have other remedies at hand?

When you look at the impeachment counts that passed Wednesday night, it’s clear Congress had other potential remedies.

Article 2 was laughably ridiculous. The House charged Trump with “obstructing Congress” because his White House refused to comply with congressional subpoenas. Presidents regularly refuse to go along with House committee requests. The House could have sued and tried to get a court to order the White House to comply.

It didn’t. It skipped straight to impeachment.

Article 1, alleging abuse of power, was similarly rushed. Congress had other remedies, and that’s obvious, because the supposedly impeachable act, Trump withholding aid to Ukraine, was circumvented by Congress. Trump did hold back the aid, but under pressure from Congress, he eventually released it.

If we delve further into the supposed crime, it becomes murkier. Trump shouldn’t have asked Ukraine to announce an investigation of the Bidens. Even if he was motivated by serious concern about corruption, he should have sat this one out given his political interests in this case. But Congress could have easily tried other ways to undo and end this misbehavior by Trump. Whether through appropriations riders or other legislation, they could have attempted to block him from applying said pressure.

Had the House tried and encountered resistance from the White House, then impeachment would have been riper. But the House did not try because House leaders didn’t want to end Trump’s misbehavior. They just wanted to impeach Trump.

The result is a shoddy, partisan impeachment. Congressional leaders do lots of things in a shoddy manner these days. Now, they’re deploying one of the gravest weapons the Constitution provides them, and they’re doing it on the cheap. It's a sad emblem of our denigrated political system.