Noah Feldman, Columnist

Maybe the Senate Isn’t Up to the Job of Trump’s Impeachment Trial

James Madison wanted the Supreme Court to try impeachments. Maybe he was right.

January 23, 2020 at 10:30 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."

James Madison had different ideas.
Photographer: Photo 12/Universal Images Group Editorial via Getty Images

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President Donald Trump is on trial in the Senate. But the Senate is on trial, too — to see if it’s capable of fulfilling its constitutional duty to hold a credible impeachment trial.

James Madison thought the Supreme Court, not the Senate, should try presidential impeachments. Until now, the other framers’ rejection of Madison’s idea seemed to have been wise. Yet the unprecedented degree of partisanship in Trump’s “trial,” and the possibility that for the first time there will be no witnesses, raises the possibility that the framers’ impeachment design has hit a dead end.