Republican senators’ failure to investigate Jan. 6 is worse than their impeachment performance

The second time around, most claimed they couldn’t convict a former president, even though he had been impeached while in office for acts committed while in office. Constitutional text and history refute that proposition, but you could at least understand one underlying motivation: The usual sanction for an impeachment conviction is removal. Trump was already gone, posed no further threat of committing official abuse, had just lost an election by 7 million votes and stood as unpopular as ever. So, at least the theory went, why bother convicting him just to formally disqualify him from ever holding federal offices to which he’d never be elected?