For example, in impeachment trials, you might expect partisanship to affect the final vote but for the trial itself to still be thorough, complete, etc. In practice, apparently this doesn't happen if the party is still basically loyal to the president.
I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that.
Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.
Also, when Clinton was impeached, it was a Republican-majority Senate impeaching a Democratic president. So not really comparable to when it's the same party for both as with Trump. Of course they went through all the steps in the trial for Clinton because that Senate wanted to impeach (and probably wanted as much damaging evidence to come to light as possible).
Not exactly true. In every trial in the senate, the guilty votes come exclusively from one side, but the not guilty votes are historically slightly more bipartisan.
For both Clinton and Johnson, all the guilty votes came from republicans, while all senate democrats and a handful of republicans voted not guilty.
Trump's impeachment trial was unique in that it was a straight party line vote.
Nixon almost certainly would have been impeached (the Democrats had a large majority in the house), and a large number of republican senators were expected to vote guilty (which would have been unique). He may have been able to escape a conviction in the senate, but the evidence was pretty damning and the American public would have been furious. In some sense his resignation was the only way to salvage the Republican Party.
I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that.
Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.