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Impeachment inquiry


TheStatGuy

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Just now, TrojanDad said:

Panties in a twist....I’m not the one whining about a famous Harvard attorney.

 

At the end of the day, don’t care what you think or what you think you need to know about me or anyone else. 
 

Your post about Dershowitz challenging his position about the law was beyond laughable. It was....sad.

You are the guy being vulgar and throwing personal insults.  Own it.  Im stating facts.  Bro.

Dershowitz has been beyond hypocritical.  Your man love of Trump has blinded you.

Really Really Sad

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Acquit if You Must, But Don't Endorse the Dershowitz Argument: https://reason.com/2020/01/30/acquit-if-you-must-but-dont-endorse-the-dershowitz-argument/

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The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump appears to be coming to its inevitable conclusion at a fairly rapid pace. The entire impeachment process has been distressing to observe, but it is time to start thinking about the fallout and how to minimize the damage to the constitutional system.

Given the legal strategy that the president's defense team has adopted, there is a particular risk that an acquittal will be framed as a repudiation of the traditional understanding of the scope of impeachable offenses and an endorsement of some version of the constitutional argument offered by Professor Alan Dershowitz. The Dershowitz argument would gut the congressional impeachment power and embolden future presidents to further abuse the powers of their office.

All high profile impeachments have legacies. To this day, we continue to argue over the lessons of the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and apparently even over the resignation of Richard Nixon. How we understand those events has consequences for how we think the constitutional system should work today. The constitutional implications of an impeachment do not turn solely on whether an officer was acquitted or convicted. They turn also on what we understand the impeachment to mean. I argued similarly after the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

The Republican senators who will be voting to acquit President Trump of the charges that have been leveled against him by the House have a responsibility not to do lasting damage to the system of constitutional checks and balances in the process. The senators will have an opportunity to go on record to explain their votes to convict or acquit, and the senators should use that opportunity to say something about what kind of precedent they are setting.

In particular, Republican senators should resist the temptation to seize on Dershowitz's argument as providing the rationale for rejecting these particular charges against this particular president. Rather than embracing a general rule that presidents cannot be constitutionally impeached for abuse of power, senators should instead try to limit their judgment to the unique circumstances of this particular case.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the charges leveled against the president are not sufficiently grave to justify his immediate removal and that the president can be safely left in office until the voters have a chance to express their judgment on his performance in November. The type of charges brought by the House might well be within the scope of the impeachment power, but senators must still exercise an independent judgment to determine whether the conduct in question is serious enough and dangerous enough to justify the immediate removal of a president. It is possible for a constitutionally conscientious senator to vote to acquit, but in casting such a vote senators should take care not to undermine the potency of the impeachment power entrusted to Congress by the constitutional framers.

Senators can put this matter in the hands of the voters, but they need not endorse a flawed understanding of the Constitution in order to do so. As they draft their statements explaining their votes, they should explicitly reject the constitutional argument put forward by the president's defense team.

I have elaborated on this argument in an op-ed now available at the Washington Post. It can be found here.

 

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After listening to Mr. Dershowitz's comments I wonder if the deified Mr. Lincoln should be posthumously impeached:

https://books.google.com/books?id=zb71VEtR-boC&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=lincoln+order+sherman+indiana+soldiers+be+released+to+vote+during+the+civil+war&source=bl&ots=Xklh1Rv3J8&sig=ACfU3U2nJ0H6sAy4adNjrAGDtuimBFM3_A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi3iu2P9a3nAhUBKawKHejjDHMQ6AEwDHoECA0QAQ#v=onepage&q=lincoln order sherman indiana soldiers be released to vote during the civil war&f=false

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In response to a frantic appeal from Governor Morton for aid,  Lincoln's faith in the support of the troops prompted him to write General Sherman and request that he release Indiana soldiers to return home and vote in the October state election.  The president told Sherman that the loss of Indiana "to the friends of the Government would go far toward losing the whole Union cause" in November.  He reminded Sherman that "Indiana is the only important State, voting in October, whose soldiers cannot vote in the field.  Any thing you can safely do to let her soldiers, or any part of them, go home and vote at the State election, will be greatly in point.  The need not remain for the Presidential election."  Lincoln made it clear to the general that "this is, in no sense, and order, but is merely intended to impress you with the importance, to the army itself, of your doing all you safely can" to aid the Union cause in Indiana.

Sherman, who thought of himself above politics, was sufficiently impressed by the president's appeal, and whether ordered or not, he permitted several thousand Indiana soldiers to return home and vote.  The furloughed soldiers, with their votes and political influence in the communities, contributed to the overwhelming victory of the National Union party in Indiana.

....

Do strongly asking Mr. Sherman to pull Indiana soldiers away from the fighting,  therefore further endangering the soldiers from other states who had to stay,  in order to assure a political victory,  is ok?

 

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11 hours ago, TrojanDad said:

Panties in a twist....I’m not the one whining about a famous Harvard attorney.

 

At the end of the day, don’t care what you think or what you think you need to know about me or anyone else. 
 

Your post about Dershowitz challenging his position about the law was beyond laughable. It was....sad.

Dershowitz retired from Harvard a little over 6 yrs. ago. Nowadays he’s basically a quote machine in search of a microphone or camera.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/01/democrats-schiff-impeachment/605803/

As the final sliver of daylight faded over the Capitol dome last night, it was clear that Democrats’ long, frustrated quest for a deus to save them from Donald Trump would produce no machina after all. Instead, there was only Representative Adam Schiff, the party’s tireless point man in the impeachment trial, who stood in the well of the Senate making an 11th-hour argument that Trump’s political-dirt-for-military-aid squeeze on Ukraine was too egregious to ignore.“If you accept the argument that the president of the United States can tell you to pound sand when you try to investigate his wrongdoing, there will be no force behind any Senate subpoena in the future,” Schiff warned the senators. It was his response to a long written statement cum question from his fellow Californian Kamala Harris, who had asked how Trump’s acquittal would “undermine the U.S. system of justice.”

Since Election Night 2016, Democrats have been searching for a savior, no matter the party or rank of the individual.

First there was James Comey, the self-righteous former FBI director impervious to Trump’s attempts to co-opt his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Then there was Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to take over the Russia inquiry after Trump’s abrupt dismissal of Comey produced a furor, but whose final report was an inconclusive punt. Next came House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, who said last summer that Trump deserved to be impeached because he’d “violated the law six ways from Sunday.”

 

There was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose reluctant conversion to the impeachment cause put Trump in the dock in December. There was Chief Justice John Roberts, whose stated reverence for institutions and the rule of law raised hope that he might conduct the Senate trial with a firmer hand than what he has thus far shown. There was the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, whose demand for additional witnesses and documents sparked a fleeting hope of persuading four moderate Republicans to join in seeking more evidence of Trump’s misdeeds.

Now, with the defendant’s foregone acquittal in sight as soon as tomorrow, it’s all come down to Schiff, the terminally earnest chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Schiff’s powers, while formidable, have proved just as un-super as everyone else’s in the near-lockstep partisan loyalty that fear of Trump has produced.

In the House managers’ presentation of their case last week, Schiff spoke some 60,000 words over three days, nearly three times the amount uttered by his next-loquacious colleague, according to an analysis by National Journal Daily. Yesterday, he answered five of the first 13 questions directed to Democrats, usually with only the barest reference to prepared notes, almost always taking the full five-minute limit the chief justice has allotted—a pace he kept up as the evening dragged on.

 

One of the president’s lawyers, the former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, insisted, “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected—in the public interest—that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” Schumer immediately asked Schiff to respond to the claim. “All quid pro quos are not the same,” he said. “Some are legitimate and some are corrupt, and you don’t need to be a mind reader to figure out which is which.” By 6:30 p.m. ET, when he asked the senators if they really wanted a president “who can abuse his office” and “do so sacrificing national security and undermining integrity of elections and there’s nothing Congress can do about it,” Schiff had grown hoarse.

The trial’s question-and-answer phase, which continues today, has injected some new energy—or at least some new motion—into the proceedings. Young pages in blue suits ferry each small buff-colored card of written questions to the chief justice in the presiding chair by marching solemnly down the chamber’s center aisle. Roberts then reads the questions aloud.

 

But the trial’s semifinal stage has produced not a shred more bipartisan agreement on the gravity of the president’s conduct, as both Republicans and Democrats asked questions mostly of their own side in an effort to bolster arguments already endlessly rehearsed.

The format nevertheless has played to Schiff’s strengths as a former prosecutor. While his fellow managers read scripted answers from prepared three-ring binders, in response to mostly friendly questions from Democrats that feel well prepared if not outright planted, Schiff has handled even the occasional hostile query from Republicans with extemporaneous aplomb.

 

When Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz submitted a somewhat tortured hypothetical query about whether it would have been acceptable for President Barack Obama to urge the Russian government to conduct an investigation into Mitt Romney’s son if he knew the younger Romney were being paid $1 million a year by a corrupt Russian company—a not-so-veiled reference to Hunter Biden’s service on the board of Ukrainian energy company—Schiff’s bottom line was simple: Presidents asking foreign governments “to target their political opponent is wrong and corrupt, period.”

 

Trump’s acquittal has been a foregone conclusion since long before the trial began, and the chance that Democrats might garner the 51 votes required to call more witnesses had all but evaporated by yesterday afternoon, despite former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s reported corroboration that Trump told him he was withholding security assistance to Ukraine until it agreed to investigations into the president’s Democratic rival.

“Probably no” was Schumer’s own assessment of the likelihood of witnesses after one potential GOP target after another either opposed the idea or signaled they might. That reality, and the political calculation behind it, was summed up neatly by Josh Holmes, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who tweeted: “More witnesses = Hindenburg. None of it changes ultimate acquittal.”

So as the hours ticked past, and senators on both sides of the aisle stood and stretched, Schiff appeared to be speaking not only to them but to posterity, as he argued that new information about Trump’s actions on Ukraine was continuing to surface almost daily, and would keep coming in the months and years ahead. “Don’t wait for the book!” he said, referring to Bolton’s memoir.

 

Responding to a question from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island about whether senators should consider the White House’s refusal to produce witnesses an “adverse inference” against the president’s innocence, under long-standing judicial practice, Schiff was emphatic. “Should you draw an adverse inference? You’re darn right you should!” But he added, “There is no need for inference here. There is just a need for a subpoena.”

But throughout the Capitol all day yesterday, it grew ever clearer that embattled Republican senators such as Cory Gardner of Colorado would rather face the wrath of swing voters who think this truncated trial is unfair than risk prolonging it for even a week or two by calling witnesses and courting the president’s wrath.

“I think we can all see what’s going on here,” Schiff said shortly after 8. “And that’s, If you want to hear from a single witness ... we are going to make this endless; we, the president’s lawyers, are going to make this endless. We promise you, we’re going to want Adam Schiff to testify, we want Joe Biden to testify, Hunter Biden … We will make you pay for it with endless delay.” But Schiff insisted, “We’re not here to indulge in fantasy or distraction. We’re here to talk about people with pertinent and probative evidence … So don’t be thrown off by this claim … You can’t have a fair trial without witnesses.”

Indeed, the House managers have spent more than a week noting that no Senate impeachment trial has ever concluded without calling some witnesses. But in this, as in so many other matters involving the political ascendancy and presidency of Donald John Trump, Schiff and his colleagues, in invoking the power of history’s example, seem poised instead to suffer one more painful lesson in its limits.

The impeachment funeral......

Image result for funeral taps meme"

SF thinks the coffin will take a long time getting in the ground. 

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11 hours ago, TrojanDad said:

Vulgar?  We evidently have different definitions. By all means, take it up with an admin. Or play the game you do with Muda and hand out the chronic down vote for every post.  Really, really sad.

My issue isn’t about Trump...it’s about a non attorney thinking he knows more than a pretty darn good one.  Contrary to your belief, you are not the smartest guy in the room.  Muda’s share about Dershowitz was a good read. Open your mind and take the time to digest it instead of jumping to give out another down vote.

Not your bro....not even close.  Now that was an insult. 
 

 

hypocrites trust hypocrites bro

46 minutes ago, Bobref said:

Dershowitz retired from Harvard a little over 6 yrs. ago. Nowadays he’s basically a quote machine in search of a microphone or camera.

A media whore.....thank you

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2 hours ago, BARRYOSAMA said:

A media whore.....thank you

That might be a little harsh ... let’s just say he tends to take positions that end up getting him in front of the camera. He’s a good enough lawyer to be able to convincingly argue for whatever side he chooses. It’s not really ideology. He’s a professional “devil’s advocate.”

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42 minutes ago, Bobref said:

That might be a little harsh ... let’s just say he tends to take positions that end up getting him in front of the camera. He’s a good enough lawyer to be able to convincingly argue for whatever side he chooses. It’s not really ideology. He’s a professional “devil’s advocate.”

His hypocritical take on impeachment was laughable at best.

 

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3 minutes ago, TrojanDad said:

I know he's retired.  But does retirement mean that he must have forgot the law?

Question for you?  If you had his resume, would you turn down the opportunities to be in front of the camera?

Bottom line, he is a Democrat, he did not vote for Trump, he didn't need this job.....but he took it because he felt the process was wrong.  If his position was 180 opposite, the same people on this forum whining, would be singing his praises.  At the end of the day, they didn't like his legal stance.....and so non-lawyers feel they have the resume's to scoff.  What a joke.

I was only pointing out his current lack of connection to Harvard. He’s no doubt a brilliant legal scholar. But he’s also more than just a bit of a contrarian. Appropriately, I have no idea what his personal politics are, because that’s not what drives the causes he takes up.  

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3 minutes ago, Bobref said:

I was only pointing out his current lack of connection to Harvard. He’s no doubt a brilliant legal scholar. But he’s also more than just a bit of a contrarian. Appropriately, I have no idea what his personal politics are, because that’s not what drives the causes he takes up.  

In this case he is a contrarian to himself.

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Republicans should think twice before endorsing the dangerous myth that impeachment requires a criminal violation.: https://reason.com/2020/02/05/good-and-bad-reasons-for-acquitting-trump/

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Marco Rubio's widely mocked justification for acquitting Donald Trump, which conspicuously avoided condemning or approving the president's conduct, was not exactly a profile in courage. The Florida Republican nevertheless laid out a defensible position that rejected a dangerously broad claim by Trump's lawyers, and in that respect he set an example his fellow senators should follow if they want to preserve impeachment as a remedy for grave abuses of presidential power.

"Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office," Rubio said. While many of Trump's critics portrayed that line as self-evidently absurd, there is a valid distinction between impeachment and removal, and between the constitutionality and the wisdom of using those powers.

For months, Trump's defenders have been warning us that the promiscuous use of impeachment is a lethal threat to democracy and our constitutional order. Since no Congress has actually removed a president in the 231 years since George Washington started his first term (although Richard Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment), those concerns seem misplaced as a general matter.

If anything, as the Cato Institute's Gene Healy has argued, the impeachment power has been sorely neglected in the face of many abuses that would have justified its use. Still, it is reasonable to wonder whether a hasty, party-line impeachment, followed by a hasty, party-line acquittal, is the best way to invigorate this check on presidential power.

Impeachment has always been and will always be a largely partisan process. But an impeachment cannot be credible if the public believes it is driven solely by political or personal animus.

As someone who does not feel at home in either of the two major parties, I was persuaded that Trump committed a serious abuse of power by pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate a political rival, partly by withholding congressionally approved military aid. But the House's case, which suffered from an arbitrary, self-imposed deadline, was not strong enough to convince a single Republican that impeachment was warranted.

Since Rubio voted with almost all of his fellow Republicans against hearing witnesses or seeking relevant documents, he could not credibly complain that the evidence was inadequate to prove the allegations against the president. Instead he argued that even if all of the charges were true, they would not justify Trump's removal nine months before he faces re-election, taking into account both "the severity of the wrongdoing alleged" and "the impact removal would have on the nation" given "the bitter divisions and deep polarization our country currently faces."

Notably, Rubio did not agree that Trump's actions vis-à-vis Ukraine were "perfectly appropriate," as the president's lawyers insisted. And he explicitly rejected "the argument that 'Abuse of Power' can never constitute grounds for removal unless a crime or a crime-like action is alleged"—a position at odds with the historical evidence and the scholarly consensus.

Even if you agree with Rubio (and half of your fellow Americans) that Trump's conduct does not justify his removal, you should hesitate before endorsing the idea that impeachment requires a criminal violation or something closely resembling it. There are many ways in which a president can violate the public trust without violating the law.

If "an impeachable offense requires a violation of established law," as Trump's lawyers maintained, Congress would have to tolerate a president who accedes to a foreign invasion, who uses prosecutorial discretion to nullify laws he does not like, who stubbornly stonewalls inquiries into his misconduct, who withholds federal funds to coerce state officials into assisting his re-election, who uses the IRS or the Justice Department to target his enemies, or who pardons himself or his cronies to avoid scandal or criminal liability. Keeping in mind that the White House will not always be occupied by a member of their party, Republicans should think long and hard before they help weave this blanket of presidential impunity.

 

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5 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Republicans should think twice before endorsing the dangerous myth that impeachment requires a criminal violation.: https://reason.com/2020/02/05/good-and-bad-reasons-for-acquitting-trump/

 

The proper question is not whether it is a good idea to have to suffer through a presidency that does all that, but does not include actual criminal behavior. The question is whether that’s what the Constitution requires. It seems pretty clear that criminal behavior is required: “High crimes and misdemeanors.”

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23 minutes ago, Bobref said:

The proper question is not whether it is a good idea to have to suffer through a presidency that does all that, but does not include actual criminal behavior. The question is whether that’s what the Constitution requires. It seems pretty clear that criminal behavior is required: “High crimes and misdemeanors.”

Alexander Hamilton says otherwise.  As did Dershowitz and Lindsay Graham.  Only one of these three is consistent in their beliefs

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