It’s an obvious point, but it can’t be emphasized enough, that the predicament that America’s partisan political competition is currently in is because the Senate failed to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. Whatever one thinks of how the 2016 election was handled (either before or after, including the Mueller investigation), and whatever one thinks of Trump’s first impeachment and its ensuing acquittal, Trump’s attack on the essence of electoral democracy in the aftermath of his defeat in 2020 required the response that it did not receive in the Senate. Just as no person is permitted to be elected president for a third term, no person should have been permitted to be elected again after the kind of especially egregious effort to subvert republican self-government that Trump perpetrated at the end of his first term.

It should be equally obvious that the failure of the Senate to exercise its constitutional responsibility in Trump’s second impeachment is a consequence of the existing procedures used to elect Senators. We might like Senators to have more political courage or virtue than than they do, but as Madison recognized when he wrote in The Federalist that government institutions must be designed for humans not “angels,” we must frame electoral procedures for the amount of courage and virtue we reasonably can expect, not the amount that we wish existed. In this respect, our procedures for electing Senators failed us–and still fail us. The reason why not enough Republican Senators voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial was the fear of losing a Republican primary election as a result of Trump’s retribution. This fear persists. Just look at the way John Cornyn has been groveling to Trump lately in the hopes of fending off a Trump endorsement for his opponent in the upcoming primary, Ken Paxton.

If you are disturbed about the Comey indictment, as you should be, then you should focus your attention on the need to change the procedures for Senate elections (along with other necessary electoral reforms). The existing procedures prevent Senators from acting in accordance with the preferences of the median voter in their states. (To invoke Nick Stephanopoulos’s terminology for this point, the existing procedures cause a misalignment between the preferences of the state’s median voter and the legislative conduct of their elected Senators). Instead, the existence of partisan primaries followed by plurality-winner general elections distort the process so that Republican Senators cave to Trump’s pressures regardless of what a majority of voters in the state want.

We need to remedy this problem as fast as we can. Let’s hope it’s not already too late.