The Senate has other urgent business. The Finance Committee is about to take up crucial retirement-savings reforms that could impact tens of millions of Americans annually. That effort could creatively address the housing needs of seniors by allowing them to use tax-sheltered savings to pay off mortgages or secure senior living arrangements without triggering taxable events. That same committee and others have work to do on the soaring costs of some prescription drugs and on infrastructure, as well as the annual battle to adequately fund the military. The Senate Intelligence Committee must work with the executive branch to persuasively educate our allies — Britain, primarily — and the American public on the threats that Chinese telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE pose to security global networks.

Yet that committee, charged with oversight of the intelligence community and thus with countless urgent issues and tasks, deemed it necessary to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. as a sort of final ritual in the opera of collusion delusion that has gripped the country since the 2016 presidential election. We need to know if this latest subpoena is simply a flexing of muscles by staff frustrated by years of fruitless digging that was rendered obviously irrelevant by the work of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his conclusion that no conspiracy occurred between Russia and Donald Trump, his family or his campaign team.

The subpoena is a maddening coda especially for those who urged that the administration cooperate with the special counsel and that Mueller not be fired or in any way impeded.