From his seat in the Senate gallery in the nation’s capital, Ken Gormley on Tuesday had a bird’s-eye view for the opening of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

“I was there for the first day of the Clinton trial, too. I’m two for two now,” said Gormley, president of Duquesne University.

What he saw Tuesday troubled Gormley, who wrote a respected 2010 New York Times best-selling book on the Clinton impeachment titled “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton v. Starr,” as well as a 1997 biography of the Watergate special prosecutor, “Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation.”

Gormley said the crisp, sunny weather outside the capitol belied the tense atmosphere inside.

After announcing impeachment trial procedures on Monday night without input from Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, outlined the steps during preliminary trial motions on Tuesday. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, wasn’t in the room for most of it, Gormley said. And when Schumer began his response, McConnell left.

“And Sen. (Ted) Cruz was sitting in the presiding chair and just looked bored,” Gormley said. “There was no spirit of bipartisanship whatsoever. Everyone seemed to have made up their minds what path they were going down.”

The legal scholar had previously suggested an alternative to impeachment that would have included a congressional censure of the president’s actions with regard to withholding funds to Ukraine and bipartisan legislation specifically prohibiting any president from asking a foreign power to meddle in U.S. elections in the future.

Republicans weren’t game and Gormley said his suggestion didn’t earn him any points with congressional Democrats. Nonetheless, Pennsylvania’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Bob Casey, offered him a coveted ticket for the opening of the Senate impeachment trial.

Gormley left around suppertime Tuesday, even though arguments about the process continued until nearly 2 a.m. Wednesday. He said McConnell’s decision to allow opening arguments to spill over three days, rather than the original rule that called for each side to be given 24 hours over two days, was somewhat encouraging.

But Gormley, who has studied all of the minutiae of impeachment through the years, is still troubled by what he called the hyper-partisanship that has emerged during this process. He rejects McConnell’s arguments that the Trump proceedings mirror the Clinton impeachment.

“Back then, the majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and the Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) got together and decided to ensure this was done with a spirit of mutual respect,” Gormley said. “That was not evident here. The rules that were set were Sen. McConnell’s.”

Witnesses were admitted in the Clinton trial — and in any every other impeachment proceeding ever held, he noted. Denying any to testify this time means denying a full public conversation about the events that led to the trial, Gormley said.

But he’s not letting Democrats off the hook.

“We’ve become so hyper-partisan that the two sides have decided the fortune of the party is more important than the national interest. It was a little difficult for me to watch them sign their names to that book (declaring their oath as jurors) when a number of them have already said, ‘This is how I’m going to vote, the evidence be damned,’ ” Gormley said.

As House impeachment managers and Trump’s lawyers bitterly debated the ground rules for proceedings into the early hours of the morning, even Chief Justice John Roberts weighed in on the tenor of the give and take. Roberts admonished both side to remember where they were and who they were addressing — “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” the Associated Press reported.

The proceedings make for long days for Roberts, who presides over the U.S. Supreme Court in the morning before heading to the trial in the afternoon, Gormley said.

There appears to be little doubt Trump will be acquitted, he said.

But he takes issue with lawyers for the president arguing that the proceedings are moot because no laws were broken. Alexander Hamilton was clear in The Federalist Papers, No. 65 that impeachment is about a public man’s abuse of the public trust, Gormley said.

Trump’s lawyers have valid concerns about calling witnesses who had firsthand conversations with the president and the possibility that such testimony would violate executive privilege, Gormley conceded. But he believes provisions could be made for calling such witnesses, but limiting the scope of public questioning.

In the end, he fears too many questions will go unanswered.

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