Noah Feldman, Columnist

Senate Impeachment Trial Won't Look Like ‘Law & Order’

A brief primer on the conflicting ways the Senate has handled trials in the past.

January 15, 2020 at 11:00 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

They make their own rules.
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

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If you’re expecting President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate to be a matter of high drama, it’s time to lower your expectations. The trial won’t look much like “Law & Order,” or for that matter any other criminal trial you’ve seen on TV or in real life: There will be no witnesses in the opening phase, and likely none at any point in the proceedings. Instead, it will look much more like a series of speeches by the House impeachment managers and Trump’s lawyers.

How can it be that the impeachment trial will barely be a trial at all? The answer lies in the Senate’s own changing practices over the centuries. Given the Senate’s love for protocol, you might imagine that there would be some time-tested, universally respected procedure for how an impeachment trial should go. The truth is otherwise.