RUTHFULLY YOURS

Judge Kenneth Starr’s speech today in defense of President Trump will go down in history as one of the great pleadings ever delivered before the Senate. He called on the solons to rebuff the charges of a “runaway house.” He called for an end to the era of eager impeachment. Generations from now, law professors will teach it to their students. It will endure as a masterpiece of constitutional law and wisdom.

We confess that we were skeptical when news hit the wires that Judge Starr would appear on the President’s behalf. The judge, after all, had been the independent counsel who pursued President Clinton to a failed impeachment. We had long opposed the very idea of an independent counsel as an affront to a central construct of our liberty, separated powers. He had ignored the warnings of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Yet today, Judge Starr dealt with all that in an honest and courageous way. He began with a point on which we had failed to reflect. The Constitution may, as it does, require that the senators, when sitting as a court of impeachment, be placed under oath. The oath is to do impartial justice. The Constitution, though, fails to require such an oath of the House, even when it is enacting articles of impeachment.

Judge Starr then walked through the history of impeachment, going back to England. He spoke of the turn America took after Watergate, when Congress passed the so-called “reform” known as the Ethics in Government Act. The law created the independent counsel. Judge Starr approvingly quoted President Clinton’s White House counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, as saying the law was “a dagger aimed at the heart of the presidency.”

Quoting Mr. Nussbaum in such a way was an wise — and gracious — thing to do. Eventually, of course, the wisdom of Mr. Nussbaum’s warning came to be recognized by the entire Congress, which in 1999 allowed the independent counsel law to sunset, unmourned by anyone. Yet the damage had been done. Of the four — if one includes Nixon — presidential impeachments, three occurred in our generations.

Judge Starr then went through the fundamental restriction the Constitution places on impeachment, limiting it to treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. He disputed the idea that the articles handed up against Mr. Trump pass that test. He laid great emphasis on the problem presented by the fact that the House moved against Mr. Trump on a purely partisan basis — not a single vote from the minority party.

Which brought him back to the contrast on which he’d opened. The House was able to act on a partisan basis in passing its articles against Mr. Trump, he reckoned, only because it had taken no oath of impartiality. In a devastating demarche, he called the representatives “oathless” and the lower chamber a “runaway house.” He implored the Senate to “guide this nation” back to when impeachment was “truly a measure of last resort.”

It may be that to appreciate all this, one has to have lived through the battles that began with Watergate, to have covered the long attack on the Reagan administration by the independent counsel of the time, Judge Walsh, or to have wielded a pen in defense of President George H.W. Bush, when he hauled off and pardoned Walsh’s prey, some of them before they were tried. Or have covered the Clinton impeachment.

It’s not our intention in recounting all this to suggest that Mr. Trump is out of peril in the Senate. The last minute leak of draft material from John Bolton’s book, which broke over the weekend and which we covered in our editorial this morning, may yet hold some surprises, even if what has surfaced so far does not look impeachable to us. Mr. Trump’s defense late this afternoon addressed the President’s logic in wanting an investigation of Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.

Whatever happens, our guess is that Judge Starr has given this Congress a teaching moment for all ages. Its moral is that sometimes the House itself can abuse the raw power of partisanship. We’d like to think that Judge Starr helped the Senate see that Mr. Trump was well within the margin of error the law affords presidents. And that it is the House that has run off the rails and that the Senate, bound by the sole oath of impartiality, has a duty to check it.