As the Senate prepares to try former President Donald Trump and potentially bar him from again holding office, some Republican lawmakers criticized the idea of trying an out-of-office president while Democrats worried about distracting from President Biden’s agenda.

The single article of impeachment against Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol is slated to be sent to the Senate Monday. His trial is scheduled to begin the week of Feb. 8 with the full Senate required to meet six days a week until the trial is complete.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell thanked Democrats for agreeing to a delayed start, which will give Trump’s defense team time to prepare. The House impeached Trump on Jan. 13 and the trial could have started immediately after that.

“Republicans set out to ensure the Senate’s next steps will respect former President Trump’s rights and due process, the institution of the Senate, and the office of the presidency. That goal has been achieved,” McConnell spokesperson Doug Andres said in a statement on Friday.

President Biden also said Friday that the delay helps his administration “get up and running” on the COVID-19 crisis.

Meanwhile, many Republicans continued to criticize the effort.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, told a Houston news station he considered a post-presidency trial “vindictive.”

“Never before has there been a trial of a person who used to be president but is no longer president. And it just strikes me as a vindictive move, you know, say what you will about the president’s role in a speech he gave. He’s no longer president. He lost the election. That used to be punishment enough in our politics,” Cornyn told KHOU.

Cornyn went on to say that he considered Trump’s address to a rally ahead of the Capitol storming a “big mistake” but held out that “what we need to hear is what really the president intended, because incitement is really about your intention.”

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina wrote Friday that he considered Trump’s “post-presidential” impeachment trial “blatantly unconstitutional.”

There is some disagreement among constitutional scholars about that claim, though many think would be constitutional.

“The President was impeached in the House from start to finish in less than 60 hours without one witness being called and without a lawyer,” Graham tweeted. “This will not happen in the Senate.”

Earlier this week in an interview with Fox News, Graham warned his fellow Republicans that if they “erased” Trump from the party, they were “going to get erased.”

Ten House Republicans voted with Democrats to impeach Trump on Jan. 13, including House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said he had “concerns” about Cheney’s vote. “She never told me ahead of time,” he reportedly told Greta Van Susteren in an interview airing Sunday. “I support her, but I do think she has a lot of questions she has to answer to the conference,” he added.

Some Democrats expressed concern that the timing of the trial could hold back President Biden’s agenda.

“I want to focus as much attention right now on the Biden agenda as possible and minimize the attention on anything other than the Biden agenda,” said Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Kaine is among a group of Democrats seeking to use the 14th Amendment — which bars federal officials from holding office again if they incite rebellion or insurrection — to forbid another presidential run by Trump. According to The Washington Post, the idea would involve passing a resolution finding Trump violated the amendment.

A parallel effort by Democrats is underway to investigate Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., for contributing to the insurrection.

This week, a handful of Democrats filed a Senate ethics complaint over the senators’ objection to certifying the presidential vote. The complaint asserts that Cruz’s and Hawley’s objections “lent legitimacy” to the mob that stormed the Capitol building.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., one of the senators behind the complaint, spoke to NPR’s Weekend Edition on Saturday.

“What they were saying encouraged them and gave aid and comfort to those who had a completely false belief that the election had been rigged and stolen,” Whitehouse said. “I don’t believe that either Senator Cruz or Hawley actually believed themselves that the election was rigged or stolen, so I don’t know quite why they were saying those things.”

Hawley and Cruz have defended their objections as responses to what they saw as voting irregularities in states that went to Biden. Neither have provided evidence to support their claims.

Updated at 12:38 p.m. ET

Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in protest on Saturday to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, braving the threat of mass arrests in what was expected to be one of the largest demonstrations against the Kremlin in years.

From the port city of Vladivostok in the east to the capital of Moscow seven time zones away in the west, protesters swept across the country in open defiance of warnings from Russian authorities that the demonstrations have been deemed illegal.

In Moscow, protesters gathered in Pushkin Square for what appeared to be the largest of the day’s protests. They were met by police trucks and city buses filled with riot officers, who blared messages from a public-address system telling demonstrators not to gather closely due to the risks of the coronavirus and warning them that the protest was unlawful. In all, Navalny supporters said that protests were planned across 90 cities, including the Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatures plunged to minus 60 Fahrenheit.

Police and protesters clashed in multiple cities and by 5 p.m. Moscow time more than 1,300 demonstrators across the country had been detained, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that monitors arrests at protests. Among those detained was Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who shared a photo of herself from inside what she said was a paddy wagon.

“They can’t put everybody in jail. There are many people and I don’t think that we have enough jails to put everyone in there,” said Maria Nechayeva, 27, an attorney at an IT company who was attending the protest in Moscow.

Mass demonstrations had been widely expected in the aftermath of Navalny’s arrest on Jan. 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he spent the last five months recovering from a near-fatal poisoning. German doctors said that Navalny was poisoned with a variant of the Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok. Navalny has blamed the Kremlin for the poisoning — a charge Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied.

“We haven’t seen protest activity like that for many years,” said Angela Stent, a professor at Georgetown University and author of the book Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest. “I think what this shows is that for whatever reason, the Kremlin is now making Navalny a much more popular figure than he was before.”

Russian authorities said Navalny was arrested for allegedly violating the terms of a suspended sentence dating to a 2014 embezzlement conviction. A Moscow court is due to rule next month on whether his 3 1/2-year sentence in the case will be converted into a prison sentence. Navalny has called the case, like others against him, politically motivated. Amnesty International has designated him a “prisoner of conscience.”

Yet even from jail, the 44-year-old opposition figure has continued to be a thorn in Putin’s side. After a judge ruled to remand him in custody for 30 days on Monday, Navalny posted a video on social media appealing to supporters to protest. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Take to the streets. Don’t do it for me, do it for yourselves and your future.”

On Tuesday, Navalny’s team released a scathing investigation accusing Putin of corruption and detailing the construction of a lavish palace on the Black Sea allegedly build for the Russian leader using a “slush fund.” The investigation, titled “Putin’s palace. History of world’s largest bribe,” has already been viewed more than 70 million times since its release on YouTube. The Kremlin has denied Putin has such a palace, calling the investigation “pure nonsense.”

In the lead-up to Saturday’s protests, Russian authorities from the Kremlin on down warned of potential crackdowns on demonstrators, with the Interior Ministry saying unauthorized demonstrations would be “immediately suppressed,” and Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, saying there would be “possible consequences related to noncompliance with the law. Prosecutors and police called the planned rallies illegal, and colleges threatened to expel students who attended them.

Amid the warnings, authorities moved to detain several key members of the opposition leader’s circle and charged them with breaking protest regulations. On Thursday, police in Moscow arrested Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, as well as Georgy Alburov, who helped produce the Putin investigation released earlier this week. Also arrested was Lyubov Sobol, an attorney for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. Yarmysh was ordered to spend nine days in jail, while Alburov was given a 10-day sentence. Sobol was released but ordered to pay a fine equivalent to roughly $3,300.

Efforts to stem the protests extended online, where videos in support of this weekend’s demonstrations have garnered hundreds of millions of views since Navalny’s arrest. The Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor — which has threatened to fine social media companies over protest-related content — said on Friday that TikTok had taken down 38% of posts calling on minors to participate in the demonstrations. Some 50% of flagged content was taken down from YouTube, while 17% was pulled from Instagram, according to Roskomnadzor. The agency said the posts amounted to calls to “participate in illegal actions.”

Undeterred by the official warnings and arrests, young Russians continued to film themselves preparing for the protests. In some, they voice support for Navalny. In others, they mock Putin.

It’s a reflection, said Stent, of the frustrations among an entire generation of Russians who have only known one leader in their lifetimes.

“If you look at some of the interviews,” she said, “with some of the young people out on the streets, they say, you know, ‘I’m 20 whatever years old, I’ve only known one leader, Putin, who’s been in power now for 21 years. You know, we want something different.’ ”

In a message of his own relayed by an attorney and posted to Instagram on Friday, Navalny took notice, thanking his followers for their support.

Said Navalny, “Respect to the schoolchildren who, according to my lawyer, ‘wreaked havoc on TikTok.’ “

Lucian Kim contributed reporting from Moscow.