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As the Senate begins the impeachment trial of President Trump, there should be no misunderstanding on one fundamental point: Senators are not jurors. This critical point was ruled on by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.

Early in that 1999 trial, I rose on the Senate floor to raise an objection to House members referring to me and my fellow senators as “jurors.” I felt it vital that the role of senators sitting in impeachment be fully understood and based on the Constitution, and not defined by labels being used by the press or by ill-informed House members. Rehnquist upheld my objection, saying, “The Senate is not simply a jury. It is a court in this case. Therefore, counsel should refrain from referring to the senators as jurors.”

Making that motion was not a step I took lightly. I believed it was vital to the matter at hand, as I believe it is vital to the matter at hand today. As I said at the time, “The repeated use of that word" — juror — "brought it home to me that the House managers meant to leave the impression with us and with the public that that solely is the role” of senators. “I felt at that point I had to object.”

So, what’s the difference? Consider Article III of the Constitution, which states, “The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury.” Clearly the Framers did not consider the Senate sitting in trial on impeachment as a “jury.”

Consider also that jurors in a criminal trial cannot ask questions, cannot raise objections and cannot discuss the case outside the jury box with the press or interested parties; jurors only try the facts as presented. And in most cases, they cannot impose a sentence — that is left to the judge.

Senators sitting in impeachment, however, can ask questions, raise objections (as I did) and discuss the case with members of the press or anyone else. Senators can take into account more than just the facts presented by the House. And, if the subject of impeachment is convicted, they do impose a sentence — which, in the case of impeachment, means removal from office.

So the Rehnquist ruling is clear: The Senate sitting in impeachment is a court — a court composed of 100 judges, not 100 jurors. As judges, they have to make decisions on a wide range of issues — the facts, the public good, how the actions taken by the president impact our democracy, fairness, history, proportionality and the Constitution.

Rehnquist’s ruling in 1999 is fundamental to how the Senate trial should be conducted and viewed in 2020. There are facts, and they are important, to be sure, but there also are issues that go to the very core of our democracy.

The central question I believe the Senate judges need to consider is not only is it lawful, but is it also acceptable to invite, to encourage, to condone and even to try to force a foreign intervention in our elections? Have the actions of the president caused injury to our country? Sitting as a court of judges, the Senate can take into account the surrounding issues and presidential actions that gave rise to the facts presented by the House. Then the Senate must decide whether these issues and actions have done serious harm to the public — whether they set a dangerous precedent for the future of our government sufficient to warrant his removal from office.

I beg our citizens, the press, members of the House, and yes, even senators, to quit erroneously referring to senators as “jurors” in the upcoming impeachment trial of President Trump.

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None of this is expected to matter to Republicans

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So far, Trump’s counsel has argued that his actions do not constitute a crime or a violation of the law, and as such, do not meet the threshold that’s needed for impeachment. This reasoning is flawed for a variety of reasons, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, and it appears Graham once agreed.

In a clip introduced by House impeachment manager Jerry Nadler, Graham is seen explaining — during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999 — why an abuse of power by the president qualifies as a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

“What’s a high crime?” Graham says in the video. “It doesn’t even have to be a crime. It’s just when you start using your office and you’re acting in a way that hurts people, you’ve committed a high crime.”

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It was 2:30 p.m. ET in the Senate chamber Friday when lawmakers turned to look at a screen and listen to a familiar voice no one had heard in quite a while: the voice of the late Sen. John McCain.

The moment came as House Democrats presenting the case against President Donald Trump in the impeachment trial invoked the Arizona Republican to highlight the importance of preserving the strategic alliance between the US and Ukraine and played a video of the 2008 Republican presidential nominee discussing the geopolitical relationship between Russia and Ukraine.

In the clip, McCain says of Russian President Vladimir Putin, "I think it makes him very nervous, if there were a success in Ukraine in bringing about a free and open society and economic success, which is not the case in Russia."

Senators looked genuinely surprised -- and some appeared comforted -- by McCain's momentary presence in the chamber.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain's best friend and now a close ally of President Trump, looked up toward the ceiling for a moment as the clip came to an end.

When it was over, Graham folded his hands together and returned his gaze to House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, one of the House managers presenting the case for Democrats, who had been speaking before the clip played.

Graham told CNN that as he looked up to the ceiling, he was overcome with "nostalgia" for his friend.

"John, the man who said we should do a no-fly zone in Syria, the man who said we should not get out of Iraq. The lone voice at times for doing things that people are tired of," Graham said.

In remarks on the Senate floor, Schiff described McCain as an "American war hero and statesman who is no stranger to this body," and reminded senators that the late senator had once said in an interview, "we are all Ukrainians" in a show of US-Ukraine solidarity.

Schiff went on to say, "Sen. McCain advised that this is a chess match reminiscent of the Cold War and we need to realize that and act accordingly," and added that "strong bipartisan support for Ukraine reflected what Sen. McCain said was an opportunity for the United States to undermine Russian leverage in eastern Europe by building, quote, a success in Ukraine."

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out in anger Saturday at an NPR reporter who accused him of shouting expletives at her after she asked him in an interview about Ukraine. In a direct and personal attack, America's chief diplomat said the journalist had “lied” to him and he called her conduct “shameful.”

NPR said it stood by Mary Louise Kelly's reporting.

Pompeo claimed in a statement that the incident was “another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt” President Donald Trump and his administration. Pompeo, a former CIA director and Republican congressman from Kansas who is one of Trump's closest allies in the Cabinet, asserted, "It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.”

It is extraordinary for a secretary of state to make such a personal attack on a journalist, but he is following the lead of Trump, who has repeatedly derided what he calls “fake news” and ridiculed individual reporters. In one of the more memorable instances, Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a physical disability.

In Friday’s interview, Pompeo responded testily when Kelly asked him about Ukraine and specifically whether he defended or should have defended Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv whose ouster figured in Trump’s impeachment.

“I have defended every State Department official," he said. "We've built a great team. The team that works here is doing amazing work around the world ... I've defended every single person on this team. I've done what's right for every single person on this team.”

This has been a sensitive point for Pompeo. As a Trump loyalist, he has been publicly silent as the president and his allies have disparaged the nonpartisan career diplomats, including Yovanovitch, who have testified in the impeachment hearings. Those diplomats told Congress that Trump risked undermining Ukraine, a critical U.S. ally, by pressuring for an investigation of Democrat Joe Biden, a Trump political rival.

Yovanovitch, who was seen by Trump allies as a roadblock to those efforts, was told in May to leave Ukraine and return to Washington immediately for her own safety. After documents released this month from an associate of Trump's personal attorney suggested she was being watched and possibly under threat, Pompeo took three days to address the matter and did so only after coming under harsh criticism from lawmakers and current and former diplomats.

After the NPR interview, Kelly said she was taken to Pompeo’s private living room, where he shouted at her “for about the same amount of time as the interview itself,” using the “F-word” repeatedly. She said he was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine.

Pompeo, in his statement, did not deny shouting at Kelly and did not apologize. Instead, he accused her of lying to him when setting up the interview, which he apparently expected would be limited to questions about Iran, and for supposedly agreeing not to discuss the post-interview meeting.

Kelly said Pompeo asked whether she thought Americans cared about Ukraine and if she could find the country on a map.

“I said yes, and he called out for aides to bring us a map of the world with no writing,” she said in discussing the encounter on “All Things Considered.” “I pointed to Ukraine. He put the map away. He said, ‘people will hear about this.’”

Pompeo ended Saturday's statement by saying, “It is worth nothing that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine.”

Nancy Barnes, NPR’s senior vice president of news, said in a statement that "Kelly has always conducted herself with the utmost integrity, and we stand behind this report.''

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n Friday, NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly found out just how sensitive the issue of impeachment has become at the State Department. During an interview, she asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo whether he owed an apology to Marie Yovanovitch, the career diplomat and ambassador to Ukraine who Trump had called "bad news," and then attacked on Twitter when she testified at the House impeachment hearings last fall. “I’ll say only this,” Pompeo responded, “I have defended every State Department official.”

Pressed on when he had defended Yovanovitch, Pompeo repeated the same line; he soon abruptly ended the interview, called the reporter into his private room, and, according to Kelly, profanely chewed her out.

I was not surprised that a question about his relationship with the department set off Pompeo’s tirade, because I had been watching tension build between career Foreign Service officers and the Trump administration since the impeachment hearings began. During Yovanovitch’s testimony, for instance, shortly after Trump tweeted that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” my timeline showed dozens of diplomats I knew taking to Facebook and Twitter to express their pride in serving with the ambassador. Having served as a political appointee in the Obama administration State Department, I worked closely with many Foreign Service officers and have seen how careful they are to avoid politics, both for their careers and for the nonideological reputation of the institution. Why, I wondered, were diplomats breaking with convention now?

Since the House hearings, I’ve spoken to more than a dozen career Foreign Service officers, and it has become clear that the impeachment process has had a major collateral effect that reaches well beyond Trump himself. They say it has sharply hurt morale within the department, and in particular has eroded their faith in Pompeo. Many of the interviewees had initially hoped the secretary would rebuild the department after Rex Tillerson’s efforts to strip it down, but they have instead seen Pompeo stand by silently as his employees were sidestepped and smeared. And they worry the loss of bipartisan trust in career diplomats, whom the president and his allies in Congress have cast as “radical unelected bureaucrats,” will inflict lasting damage on the institution’s role in foreign policy-making.

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s quarrel with NPR escalated on Monday after one of the radio network’s reporters was barred from flying on the secretary’s plane during an upcoming trip to Ukraine.

Michele Kelemen, a veteran reporter for the network, was removed from the list of reporters allowed to fly with Pompeo on a trip to Eastern Europe, only days after the secretary reportedly exploded at another NPR reporter for asking questions about Ukraine. The State Department Correspondents’ Association swiftly condemned the move in a statement on Monday.

“Michele is a consummate professional who has covered the State Department for nearly two decades,” the statement said. “We respectfully ask the State Department to reconsider and allow Michele to travel on the plane for this trip.”

“The State Department has courageously defended journalists around the world through statements under its seal,” it continued. “The State Department’s professional ethos commits employees to ‘serve with unfailing professionalism in both my demeanor and my actions, even in the face of adversity.’ We are committed to do our part to preserve a respectful, professional relationship with the institution we cover.”

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The correspondents association concluded that the exclusion was in retaliation for a testy exchange between Pompeo and NPR host Mary Louise Kelly on Friday morning. During a roughly 10-minute interview, Kelly asked Pompeo a number of questions on U.S. policy in Iran and on Pompeo’s involvement in the Ukraine scandal at the center of President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Kelly asked whether Pompeo owed an apology to former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch for her unceremonious ouster from her post in Ukraine. Yovanovitch was removed as Trump and his circle viewed her as an obstacle to pushing Ukrainian officials to investigate his Democratic rivals.