Weaponizing Impeachment against Political Opponents by Alan M. Dershowitz by 1KIKI

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Weaponizing Impeachment against Political Opponents by Alan M. Dershowitz

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Thursday, November 7, 2019 18:16
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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 8:21 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

To be impeached, a president must commit a crime (misdemeanor is a species of crime) and the commission of that crime must also constitute an abuse of office. An abuse of office without an underlying crime is a political sin, but not an impeachable offense.

Weaponizing Impeachment against Political Opponents
by Alan M. Dershowitz

To be impeached, a president must commit a crime (misdemeanor is a species of crime) and the commission of that crime must also constitute an abuse of office. An abuse of office without an underlying crime is a political sin, but not an impeachable offense.

This very issue was debated at the Constitutional Convention, where one delegate proposed "maladministration" as the criteria for impeachment and removal of a president. James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, strongly objected on the ground that so vague and open-ended a criterion would have the president serve at the will of Congress and turn us from a Republic with a strong president into a parliamentary democracy in which the chief executive can be removed by a simple vote of no confidence. Instead, the Convention adopted strict prerequisites for impeachment: treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Congress is not above the law. It is bound by what the Framers accepted and cannot now apply the criterion the framers explicitly rejected.

Most important, misusing the impeachment power in a partisan manner would pose, in the words of Hamilton, "the greatest danger" to our Constitution.

The constitutional power to impeach a duly elected president was intended by the Framers of the Constitution as a neutral, non-partisan tool of last resort to be used against only criminal incumbents in extreme cases. It is now being deployed as a partisan weapon that can be used routinely against presidents of a different party from those who control the House of Representatives.

Under the views of some members of Congress, any time the House is controlled by one party, a simple majority can properly vote to impeach. As Congresswoman Maxine Waters put it: "Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law." She is wrong. The Constitution is the law and she is not above it.

The recent partisan misuse of this emergency power began with the impeachment of former President William Jefferson Clinton by the Republican-controlled House in 1998. Clinton did not commit an impeachable offense, even if he feloniously lied under oath about his sex life. Such perjury, if it occurred, would satisfy the definition of a "crime," but not meet the required Constitutional criteria of a "high crime and misdemeanor." If President Clinton committed a crime, it would be a low crime related to his sex life and comparable to the low felonies — adultery and paying off an extortionist — committed by Alexander Hamilton when he was Secretary of the Treasury. Had Hamilton payed the extortionist from Treasury funds, as he was falsely accused of doing, he would have been guilty of an impeachable high crime.

To be impeached, a president must commit a crime (misdemeanor is a species of crime) and the commission of that crime must also constitute an abuse of office. An abuse of office without an underlying crime is a political sin, but not an impeachable offense.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15120/weaponizing-impeachment

read more at the link above

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 6:16 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Mark Zaid, the John Podesta, Clinton and Schumer-linked attorney who founded the anti-Trump nonprofit 'Whistleblower Aid' in 2017, tweeted "It's very scary. We will get rid of him, and this country is strong enough to survive even him and his supporters. We have to."

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/whistleblowers-attorney-vowed-get-
rid-trump-2017

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