"Yeah, but there's no law against serving yourself or failing to faithfully execute the laws, so there's nothing we can do about it."Hse Dem trial brief: President Trump abused the powers of his office to invite foreign interference in an election for his own personal political gain and to the detriment of American national security interests. He abandoned his oath to faithfully execute the laws— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) January 18, 2020
They don't have to make a legal argument, but they'll have to make one better than that. Because the real trial is not in the Senate. It's in the court of public opinion.
They don't need to make a legal argument, and they know it. But is this the team to make a political one? The House managers understand that better than Trump does.Cipollone plans to open Trump's defense on core constitutional issues. Then Sekulow for an overview. Starr, Ray, Dershowitz & others will tackle “discrete functions” during the trial, a source close to the president's legal team said Saturday. https://t.co/LcfJuazmio @politico— Darren Samuelsohn (@dsamuelsohn) January 18, 2020
The strength of their Constitutional argument is that, if they say so, it's unconstitutional. Which returns the battle to a spat between Congress and the White House. But the question remains: if Congress can't question the POTUS, and the POTUS can't be impeached for not doing his job faithfully, haven't we truly established the Imperial Presidency?Trump team response to House brief pic.twitter.com/PnMFh6L8SE— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 18, 2020
The winning argument is not "I can't do anything wrong and you can't ever prove I did anything wrong." That's the argument of a criminal who escaped justice on a technicality. A very Pyhrric victory, indeed.
The other night Lawrence Tribe responded to Dershowitz's claim that Trump had to violate a federal statute in order to be impeached by pointing out, at the time the Impeachment section of the Constitution was adopted and ratified, there were no federal statutes.
ReplyDeleteI think the Dersh is going to go for his typical strategies of how to get rich guys off for killing their wives. I can't remember who it was I heard laughing their heads off when a TV talking head called Dershowitz an expert in Constitutional Law, they said that he was no such thing.
He dealt in criminal law, which is affected by ConLaw, but isn't even "ConLaw Lite." Dershowitz is conflating the two now, to pad his resume.
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