But even onlookers tuning in with appropriately low expectations have reason to be disappointed by how the members of this once-august body have gone out of their way not to hear evidence essential to the decision before them. Even those cynical about the institution in this hyper-partisan age might have expected more, if only a little bit more, than for a Senate majority to line up to deny the plain reality of the presidential conduct at issue. And even those who managed to anticipate the Senate’s willingness to mindlessly ignore reality in order to acquit the president of charges of which he is plainly guilty could be surprised at the degree to which senators seem to want plaudits for doing so. Early in the 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley quipped in a sonnet, referring to Parliament, that “a Senate [was] Time’s worst statute, unrepealed.” The U.S. Senate seems bent on proving the point.

How else should we interpret Republican senators’ response to last week’s implied criticism from the lead impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, who closed the House’s opening arguments by pointing to reports that senators were warned their heads would be “on a pike” if they voted against the president? Republicans were outraged, and they wanted reporters to know it. Senator James Lankford described the Republican side of the aisle as “visibly upset” by Schiff’s reference to the reports. Senator Lisa Murkowski said Schiff had “lost her” with the comment. Senator Susan Collins declared that reports of the warning were “not true,” even while Schiff was still speaking on the Senate floor.

Schiff, at the very least, correctly reflected the implication of those reports: This is a group of people who have time and again set aside principles in fear of an angry tweet and who are openly toying with doing so again. Republican senators were furious at Schiff’s accurate diagnosis of their cowardice.

Whom exactly do these people think they’re kidding? By what possible metric can the U.S. Senate flatter itself that it remains the world’s greatest deliberative body? Certainly not by the quality of the deliberation that takes place there. Any grade-school class that meets as a group during circle time to decide what the students want for a snack does more genuine deliberation than does the Senate. Debates have come to take place before an empty chamber and speeches, whatever their purpose, are never designed to convince colleagues. Perhaps it’s appropriate that reporters have amused themselves during the trial by keeping tabs on which senators are drinking milk—the only beverage other than water allowed on the Senate floor under the chamber’s rules, but one that has a tendency to make the drinker look like a child.

And then there’s the consternation at Schiff’s candor. Senators Lankford, Murkowski, and Collins cannot really imagine that people are watching their performance in office with admiration. They cannot actually believe that Americans are nodding with approbation at the courage they are showing in lining up strictly according to party expectations even in the face of the institutional interests of the body with respect to access to information and witnesses in a weighty matter they are charged with deciding. Their behavior is more in line with what the Victorian wit W. S. Gilbert once described in deriding the overly loyal, substance-less career politician: “I always voted at my party’s call / And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”