The Democrats think they’ve just had a big triumph. The president’s been impeached. But Republicans see themselves as gaining the upper hand.

The House couldn’t lift the event into an air of historical gravity. They dressed in dark clothes and never smiled, as at a wake, but the deceased was making kicking sounds from the casket and appeared to be tweeting, so it was incongruous.

There was no “debate” and no one tried to persuade anybody. The revealing moment was when Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the first article had passed and some Democrats apparently began to clap. She threw them her mother-of-five look: Don’t make me come up there. They were surely members of the Progressive Caucus. They wanted to applaud because they were happy, and they were happy because they are shallow.

What felt like news came the day after, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who throughout the crisis had been relatively quiet and oblique, and who is never interesting by accident, suddenly became fiery. “The Senate exists for moments like this,” he said, rather menacingly. “Transient passion and violent factionalism” have swept the House. “The moment the framers feared has arrived. A political faction in the lower chamber have succumbed to partisan rage.” They have produced a “failed inquiry,” a “slapdash case” which is “constitutionally incoherent.” So “the Senate must put this right.”

This was, among other things, the leader of the Senate declaring war on at least the actions of the House and its speaker. Again, this is not some House blowhard but a serious man, and a careful one.