Surely not? I couldn’t believe it when I heard the news. Even Chief Justice John Roberts—the man who had said that he and his fellow justices “don’t work as Democrats or as Republicans” and who, after the rabidly partisan Kavanaugh hearings in 2018, had also said that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges”—even he, I thought, could not possibly have expected to be taken seriously when, at one o’clock in the morning after the first day of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, he said, “I think it is appropriate at this point for me to admonish both the House managers and the President’s counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.” No, I thought, he must have been making a joke, though one that could hardly be considered appropriate to the solemnity with which Nancy Pelosi had insisted the impeachment of a president should be treated.

Or was it possible that the Harvard-educated Chief Justice had not known that he was telling a joke? In a quick Google search, I saw no unironic examples of the Senate’s being described as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” or “the greatest deliberative body in the world” after 1860. That was when the Honorable Marcus Junius Parrot wrote in the Elwood, Kansas, Free Pressof “resolutions which, to the lasting disgrace of our country, were adopted by the United States Senate. Speeches and not action; words, not deeds—this is