Senate Democrats refuse to hold even a token trial on House articles of impeachment, further diminishing this check on executive abuses of power.

The Senate voted on party lines Wednesday to summarily dispose of the two impeachment articles passed by the House against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which is one more step in defining down the constitutional power of impeachment. Republicans will return the disfavor, possibly sooner than Democrats expect. While President Biden’s immigration policies have been a debacle, the failure is Mr. Biden’s. We don’t think the evidence existed to impeach Mr. Mayorkas, and given a divided Congress it was a political maneuver not designed for success. Yet the Republican House went ahead and impeached the Homeland Security chief, sending the articles over to the Democratic Senate, which the Constitution says “shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” The Senate should have at least held a trial of some limited sort, and Democrats could have used it to make the case that Mr. Mayorkas was innocent. Instead they dismissed the two articles as unconstitutional with separate votes, one of them 51-49, and the other 51-48 with GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski voting present. “To validate this gross abuse by the House would be a grave mistake and could set a dangerous precedent for the future,” said Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Yet that’s exactly what a future Republican Senate leader might say in refusing to hold a trial on some impeachment articles passed by a Democratic House. Democrats are now collaborators in diminishing this constitutional check on real executive abuses.

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