By this time, Congress had already established that grand jury perjury was an impeachable offense: In 1989 we had removed a federal judge, Walter L. Nixon Jr., for that very crime. When I delivered the opening argument in the Senate trial, I noted that we ought not to hold the president to a lower standard than we do a federal judge.

Fast forward to the present day, and things are drastically different. Just moments after President Trump took the oath of office, The Washington Post ran a headline, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.” Mr. Nadler later campaigned for the Judiciary chairmanship with the promise that he was best fit to lead an impeachment. Worse, 103 current members of the House Democratic caucus voted to move forward with impeachment even before President Trump’s July 25 phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

Vitriol and blind hatred aside, President Trump has been robbed of his constitutionally protected due process rights. There was no independent investigation. Instead, Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, conducted a few weeks of closed-door hearings in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center. This is the same man who infamously stated on cable television that he had overwhelming evidence that President Trump had colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. The special counsel Robert Mueller found nothing of the sort.

The closed-door hearings led to a railroad job in the House Judiciary Committee, where a majority denied those of us in the minority our rights. When we finally considered the articles of impeachment, they were so broad and flimsy that almost any other president could most likely have been accused of them. Article II, the obstruction of Congress charge, is particularly bad, as Democrats failed even to give a court — the proper arbiter of these disagreements — the chance to weigh in on the matter.

Further, none of the articles allege that the president committed a crime — a drastic departure from the Nixon and Clinton cases. Nevertheless, Democrats prioritized haste as they jammed through their impeachment vote. Again and again, Democrats told us that Congress could not wait to impeach the president. Yet Speaker Pelosi’s decision to withhold the articles from the Senate shows us that we can apparently wait. This whole exercise has been completely bunk.