It has already been both a pioneering and superlative week at the crossover between the political and legal worlds (and it's only Wednesday!). Pioneering because this week saw both the opening of the first criminal trial of an American ex-president as well as the first Senate trial of a sitting cabinet member (after impeachment by the House of Representatives). The superlative part just happened today as well, as the "trial" of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was undoubtedly the fastest impeachment proceedings ever to occur in the Senate. The senators were sworn in as jurors, and then (after a few hours of Republicans blathering in a failed attempt to delay the inevitable) the whole body voted on motions to dismiss the two charges contained in the impeachment. Both were strict party-line votes, so the Mayorkas impeachment trial is now over before it even began.

For those of you who may have blinked and missed it all, here's what just happened:

The impeachment trial of the first sitting Cabinet secretary came to a close a little over three hours after it started after Republicans quickly quashed an opportunity for limited debate and the creation of an impeachment committee, marking a rapid close to the first impeachment of a sitting cabinet secretary.

Democrats, voting along party lines, found the first article charging Mayorkas with "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law" to be unconstitutional. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) voted present. Democrats voted again along party lines, finding the second article charging Mayorkas with "breach of public trust" also to be unconstitutional. The trial came to a conclusion before the House impeachment managers could present their argument.

In other words, Democrats were voting in support of the idea that the impeachment itself was invalid and purely political. No "high crimes and misdemeanors" were identified in the impeachment articles themselves, therefore the impeachment itself was unconstitutional and never should have happened. Here was their argument in a nutshell:

In remarks on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the effort to oust Mayorkas "the least legitimate, least substantive and most politicized impeachment trial in the history of the United States."

"The hard right wants to exploit the supremely serious matter of impeachment for the sake of cable news hits and content for social media," Schumer said. "This is an illegitimate and profane abuse of the U.S. Constitution."

Schumer also went on to state: "To validate this gross abuse by the House would be a grave mistake and could set a dangerous precedent for the future." Which is the whole point, really.

All Senate Democrats (plus the three Independents who caucus with them) agreed, providing the 51 votes necessary to end the proceedings. All Republicans voted against doing so, with the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted "present" on the vote for the first article of impeachment -- but then went ahead and voted with her party on the second article's vote.

This was somewhat hypocritical for some of these Republicans, who decided that hair-splitting reasons to toe the party line were good enough for them. Previous to today, Senator Mitt Romney had actually agreed that the impeachment did not rise to the language of the Constitution about impeachable offenses, and therefore he would not vote to convict as a result. A few other GOP senators (Murkowski included) played it coy, but also seemed to signal that they'd ultimately wind up voting with the Democrats as well. But when the votes actually happened, none of them stood up for what they obviously believed was right but instead meekly went along with their party. No doubt they will give some version of: "Well, I would have voted against conviction, but I thought we should at least have had a trial of some sort," which is nothing short of a cop-out. It's not that Mayorkas was either guilty or innocent, it is that the impeachment itself was unconstitutional. And even Mitt Romney couldn't bring himself to vote for that basic concept in the end (although Murkowski did at least give a nod to it -- on the first vote, but not the second).

Some Republican senators were incensed that the trial was halted before it began. Virtually every single one of them is a complete and utter hypocrite. Here is the question that any enterprising journalist should ask them, immediately after they give a statement decrying what just happened in the Senate as some sort of affront to the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution (or whatever else they blather about in apocalyptic terms): "That's all fine and good, but could you explain to me why you were one of 45 senators who voted to do exactly the same thing -- dismiss the impeachment charges without a trial -- when it was President Donald Trump being impeached? How do you reconcile what you just said with how you voted then, Senator?" There is no honest answer to that other than: "Because I am a total partisan and a complete hypocrite, of course."

The entire exercise was nothing more than political posturing for the upcoming election, plain and simple. The Mayorkas impeachment was the consolation prize Republicans awarded themselves after their massive failure to impeach President Joe Biden (due to their not being able to find a scintilla of evidence that Biden had ever done anything illegal, after over a year of investigating both him and anyone they could conceivably connect to him). That was supposed to be the plan -- impeach Biden (at least once) as payback for Trump's two impeachments. Since that became impossible even for a Republican-controlled House, they settled on impeaching one of Biden's cabinet members instead... for doing his job, carrying out Biden's policies. Even that was touch-and-go, since the first House floor vote to impeach Mayorkas failed (due to defections by Republican members). But they managed to get across the finish line on their second try, after which they held onto the articles of impeachment (without officially sending them to the Senate) for a few months... for purely political reasons.

What Republicans dearly wanted to happen next would have been an extended campaign commercial for Republicans over Biden's border policies. The House impeachment managers were going to rant and rave about the border crisis and condemn Mayorkas for, essentially, not being a Republican. To give but one indication of how unserious the House impeachment circus act truly would have been, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was named one of the impeachment managers. 'Nuff said....

What Democrats did today was to deny Republicans all that free television time. Rather than a dog-and-pony show intended merely to highlight the border and immigration (an issue Republicans have made the centerpiece of their campaign strategy), Democrats pulled the plug before the show even began. It all ended with a whimper, not a bang.

Which is truly how it should have ended. This was an unserious abuse of the Constitution, as Schumer rightfully pointed out. It was not a serious impeachment -- it was pure politics. The Senate rejected it on those grounds alone, and that was all that it deserved. Republican senators can howl all the want about the sanctity of the Constitution's impeachment process, but it was Republicans in the House who violated that process, not Democrats in the Senate. A precedent was indeed set, and it was the correct one. Legitimizing the partisanship nonsense from the House with a full trial would have been a further abuse of the Constitution, which Democrats refused to let happen. Doing so also would have encouraged similar abuses by the House in the future, impeaching cabinet members willy-nilly because they don't agree with the administration's policies -- just to get some television time to make a political argument (instead of a constitutional one).

Perhaps this precedent will be used in the future by Republicans to dismiss a valid impeachment brought by a Democratic House. That's the danger, but it's been inherent in the process all along (trial or no trial). Gerald Ford (back when he was House Minority Leader) gave the best definition of "impeachable offenses" ever, by pointing out that the entire process could indeed get extremely partisan at times: "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." To which we now have to add a secondary qualifier: "A legitimate constitutionally-impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the Senate considers it to be at any given moment in history -- no matter what the House has to say about it." Impeachment has always been mired in politics. The Constitution itself almost guarantees this. There was no way on Earth that Mayorkas was going to be convicted and removed from office by the current Senate, and since they considered the entire impeachment itself an abuse of the Constitution from the very start, there was no reason for them to lend it any legitimacy at all. Hence: the shortest impeachment trial ever.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant