Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Department of Justice and a constitutional scholar, has identified 12 impeachable offenses committed by Donald Trump. But, as he notes, many of these constitutional violations are not unique to the Trump administration.
Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that “the evidence supporting the impeachment articles is extremely strong” but adds that there are no good reasons not to hear from additional firsthand witnesses in the Senate trial and thinks it will be a hard sell from some vulnerable Republican Senators.
Now that President Trump has announced — via a letter signed by Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel — that he will not cooperate in any way with the impeachment inquiry begun in the House of Representatives, we no longer have just a crisis of the presidency.
In the last weeks, a lot of people who followed the hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives became familiar with Hamilton’s definition of an impeachable offense as “the abuse of violation of some public trust.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, the only witness at Wednesday's impeachment hearing to be invited by Republicans, argued in his opening statement that Democrats have not produced the evidence to justify impeaching Trump.
Senate Republicans met with White House counsel Pat Cipollone over lunch Wednesday to discuss strategy for an upcoming Senate impeachment trial in an effort to shore up Trump’s legal and political defenses.
Republican-called witness Jonathan Turley pushed back against House Democrats for using Trump’s refusal to turn over certain information related to the impeachment inquiry as a reason to impe ach him, citing the previous impeachment investigation into former President Richard Nixon.
Stanford University professor Pamela Karlan apologized after she received backlash for mentioning Trump's 13-year-old son Barron Trump during the impeachment hearing.
Nadler included accusations of obstruction from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in his opening statement, saying that they were the primer for Trump’s contacts with the Ukrainian president.
One of the first House Democrats to call for Trump's impeachment urged his colleagues on Wednesday to include instances of Trump's actions and rhetoric inflaming racial tensions in any upcoming articles of impeachment.
Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, said in his opening statement that Trump’s conduct “clearly constitutes” the constitutional standard for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” because Trump “was using his office to seek a personal political and electoral advantage over his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and over the Democratic Party.”
November 25, 2019 by Truthdig. Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Department of Justice and a constitutional scholar, has identified 12 impeachable offenses committed by Donald Trump. But, as he notes, many of these constitutional violations are not unique to the Trump administration.
"If we take a narrow approach to impeachment, that will mean that all the more egregious violations will be viewed as having been endorsed and not rebuked and successive presidents will feel they have a green light to emulate Trump on everything except a Ukrainian shakedown."
Bush and Obama, like Trump, violated the appointments clause of the Constitution by appointing people who were never confirmed by the Senate as required. The three presidents, to override Congress, all routinely abused their right to use executive orders.
Under the Executive Order 10333 the president spies on Americans as if they were foreigners, although this surveillance has not been authorized by statute. Bush embarked on a global program of kidnapping and torture, including of foreign nationals, which Obama continued.
Bush and Obama bequeathed to us nine illegal wars, if we include Yemen. None were declared by Congress, as is demanded by the Constitution. Bush placed the entire U.S. public under government surveillance in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which makes it a crime for the government to surveil any American citizen without authorization by statute. Under the Executive Order 10333 the president spies on Americans as if they were foreigners, although this surveillance has not been authorized by statute. Bush embarked on a global program of kidnapping and torture, including of foreign nationals, which Obama continued. Bush and Obama carried out targeted assassinations, usually by militarized drones, across the globe. And Obama, reinterpreting the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Act, gave the executive branch the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens. The killings began with drone strikes on the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son. Such a violation denies U.S. citizens due process. By signing into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama—whose record on civil liberties is even more appalling than Bush’s gutted the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force.
Such a violation denies U.S. citizens due process. By signing into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama—whose record on civil liberties is even more appalling than Bush’s gutted the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force.
Declare War Clause. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 empowers Congress alone to take the nation from a state of peace to a state of war. That power cannot be delegated.
The proceeding took on a different shape than two weeks of hearings that came before it in the House Intelligence Committee, where fact witnesses shared firsthand knowledge of Trump’s foreign policy dealings and at times revealed new facts to the public.
The witnesses before the judiciary panel, however, were brought to put Trump’s actions in historical context and to help those lawmakers determine which articles of impeachment — if any — to draft against him.
Karlan quickly established herself as the most forceful voice on the witness panel, when she challenged Collins’ assertion that the legal experts “couldn’t possibly have digested” the 300-page report released Tuesday by Democrat-led House committees.
The three witnesses called forward by the Democrats came to the hearing with a near-unanimous conclusion: that Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to announce investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, and a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election, constitutes an impeachable offense.
To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and former state treasurer Joe Malone, who supports Trump.
An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz: What is an impeachable offense? Rep. Maxine Waters, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says the definition is purely political: “whatever Congress says it is—there is no law.” She’s wrong. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Framers debated impeachment of a president. Some argued for the power of Congress to remove the president for “maladministration” or other open-ended terms that appeared in several state constitutions. Others, including James Madison, opposed such vague criteria, fearful that they would turn the republic into a British-style parliamentary system, in which Congress could remove a president over political differences—effectively a vote of no confidence. That, Madison argued, would be the “equivalent to tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” The Framers wanted an independent president who could be removed only for genuine wrongdoing. So they agreed to the criteria that became part of the Constitution: “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was once very reluctant on impeachment, but has now used the term ‘bribery’ to describe communications between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president, in discussion of possible impeachable offenses. Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe joins Joy Reid to discuss this and more regarding the impeachment inquiry of the president.
The White House tried to justify its refusal to comply with Democrats’ subpoenas by claiming that their impeachment inquiry is unconstitutional. Laurence Tribe explains to Lawrence O’Donnell why that White House argument is “legally vacuous” and would rebuffed by the courts for putting the president above the law.
That’s 67 senators, if you’re counting—or, in the glass-half-empty variation, the number of Republican senators required to jump ship is 20. … “The Constitution contains quorum requirements [elsewhere] and clearly distinguishes between percentages of a particular chamber and percentages of ‘members present,’” said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the co-author of the book To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. “That language in the provision for Senate conviction on impeachment charges is quite deliberate, creating precisely the possibility” described above.
Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the framers of the Constitution created impeachment for actions that align “precisely” with what President Trump is accused of doing. “The framers reserved impeachment for situations where the president abused his office. … In particular, they were specifically worried about a situation where the president used his office to facilitate his own reelection,” Feldman said. “… That is precisely what the framers anticipated.”
When asked if there was sufficient evidence to charge President Trump with the high crime and misdemeanor of obstruction of Congress, Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School argued that “putting yourself above the law as president” is an impeachable offense.