On Thursday, the 100 senators of the 106th U.S. Congress were sworn in as jurors to hear the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. The legislators, who consider themselves part of "the world's greatest deliberative body," thus began the second such trial in U.S. history, 131 years after their predecessors failed by one vote to remove then President Andrew Johnson. The chance that the outcome of this hearing will be any different is remote; the two-thirds majority needed to convict the president is assumed to be out of reach.
Still, dismissing the possibility would be rash. After the Republican Party was trounced in midterm elections last November, it was widely assumed that the House of Representatives would quickly wrap up the impeachment proceedings and end the mess. It did not. And even though senators are acutely attuned to public opinion -- and Mr. Clinton's approval rating is soaring -- they quickly shot down a bipartisan proposal to hold a quick trial and then censure the president.
Instead, the Senate has opted for a real trial, even though bargaining over how the hearing will be conducted continued right up to Thursday's swearing-in ceremony. A real trial is the right decision, even though it has risks of its own. At a time of growing public disillusionment with politics -- aggravated in part by the whole impeachment fiasco -- the Senate cannot afford to be seen as shirking what is perhaps its most important constitutional duty.