On Wednesday, Joe Biden was sworn in as America’s 46th president, beginning a new chapter of U.S. history.

For a day, we all could take pride as, despite the violent events of Jan. 6, our nation came together to complete another peaceful transition of power. And then it was back to politics as usual.

To the dismay of many Wyomingites, President Biden quickly issued a series of actions aimed at the minerals industry.

The administration’s moves to halt the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline and place a 60-day moratorium on oil, gas and coal leasing and permitting on federal lands will deal a serious economic blow.

“When it comes to energy policy, the Biden administration is off to a divisive and disastrous start,” U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said in a Thursday statement.

And that’s just one area of contention.

However, despite having plenty of policy to debate and work to do, Democrats and some Republicans in Congress seem to be more interested in pressing various grievances against former President Donald Trump and his supporters. Aided by 10 of their Republican colleagues — including Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. — Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to impeach Trump for his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

President Trump, they allege, incited the riot with remarks he delivered to a massive “Save America” rally ahead of the violence; Cheney said Trump “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack” and that “everything that followed was his doing.”

The Senate plans to soon consider whether to convict now-private citizen Trump of “incitement of insurrection.” However, nothing good can come from an impeachment trial and we would encourage lawmakers to dismiss the charge. If the president’s prosecutors think the proceedings will do anything other than fire up Trump’s detractors and enrage his supporters, they’re mistaken.

In our view, then-President Trump handled the entire affair shamefully — particularly in his reluctance to unequivocally denounce the rioters as they wreaked havoc in and around the Capitol building; the extremists were anything but “special.”

To pin everything on Trump, however, is just too much. The radicals who attacked police, destroyed public property and attempted an insurrection are responsible for their actions — and they were outliers from the vast majority of rally-goers, who peacefully exercised their First Amendment rights.

But the biggest problem with this impeachment trial is that Congress can’t remove a president from office when voters have already done so. In theory, lawmakers could bar Trump from ever running for public office again. However, there’s no chance that two-thirds of the Senate will vote to do that — and prohibiting one’s political opponent from running for office bears some resemblance to the “banana republic crap” in which extremists stormed the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election.

It is time to move on.

In an appearance on Fox News last week, Rep. Cheney said it’s important for Republicans to “come together as a party now to move forward, to make sure that we are fighting against the kinds of policies that we know the Democrats are going to put forward and also that we’re putting forward a positive agenda of hope and opportunity for the future, letting people understand what Republicans stand for.”

Of course, Cheney promptly dove back into the infighting over the weekend, when her office responded to criticism from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., by mocking his makeup. If we’ve learned anything from recent years, isn’t it that we need to rise above this sophomoric brand of politics?

As Cheney herself suggested, Congress should instead be focusing on the task at hand: working to create a better future. And that means looking forward, not back.