Famous legal expert Alan Dershowitz either doesn’t understand the difference between being impeached and convicted or he deliberately misled Fox News viewers when he fear mongered that the “implications” of a Trump impeachment would be the impeachment of any Republican candidate running against Joe Biden in 2024.
In a visit to Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo show, Dershowitz groused about the upcoming trial of Donald Trump in the Senate.
DERSHOWITZ: It will be unconstitutional but that probably won’t bother the senators. The Constitution is very clear: the subject, the object, the purpose of impeachment is to remove a sitting president.
…
You cannot put citizen Trump on trial. If you could do that, it would be a bill of attainder, number one, putting somebody on trial who is not a sitting president.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Dershowitz is correct about the trial following Trump’s impeachment being unconstitutional. But what Dershowitz claimed would be the implications was a ridiculous and likely dishonest attempt to protect his favorite p***y grabber.
DERSHOWITZ: And number two, the implications would be horrendous. It would mean that if the Republicans came up with a terrific candidate, say not Donald Trump, to run against President Biden in 2024, the Democrats could simply impeach him. If you can impeach anyone who is not a sitting president, there are no limits to the power of the Congress to try ordinary citizens.
First of all, Trump was impeached while in office, not as a private citizen. Also, he was impeached for a very serious breach of official conduct, “inciting violence against the government of the United States.” It’s hard to think of a more serious offense by a public official. Yet Dershowitz suggested the offense was something trumped up (no pun intended).
But unless that hypothetical Republican candidate running against Biden already holds public office and has betrayed an oath of office in some way, it’s absurd to think Congress would impeach a private citizen because they “got away with it” with Trump.
So unless Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor for 50 years, is losing his grip, he’s being dishonest with this scare tactic.
Or maybe not. Dershowitz tweeted before the show, “I will be discussing the constitutionality of impeaching Trump after he leaves office on @MariaBartiromo on Fox News today.”
Does Dershowitz not know that Trump was already impeached and that he's still in office?
Watch it below, from the January 17, 2021 Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.
There is, however, a silver lining to this uniquely American differentiation between lying “tout court” and lying under oath. In fact, over sixty court challenges of the 2020 elections came to naught (failed miserably). Only one challenge got some relief and that was on procedural grounds not substantive merit. That record is attributable to the fact that the challengers were reluctant to repeat – when under oath – the allegations, speculations and outright lies that they were wont to say out of court. They’re still doing it, too.
At last count, according to WAPO’s scrupulous monitoring, former president Trump’s score sheet for misleading statements and/or outright lies had crossed the threshold of 30,000: all of them on Twitter or video.
There have been four impeachments in my lifetime:
1) Nixon, for telling his goons to break-into the DNC offices, to steal any information that might further his own election (the fact that Nixon resigned before being impeached is an irrelevant detail in my book).
2) Clinton, for lying about a blow job from a consenting adult (who had the foresight to put the dress in the freezer for posterity … that says it all, doesn’t it? )
3) Trump1, for saying he’d withhold badly needed American aid to an allied country unless said country provided “dirt” on his election opponent
4) Trump2, for inciting an insurrection
Only one of these impeachments did NOT violate any principles laid down in the Constitution of the USA and that was the Clinton affair.
I fully expect the GOP to launch a frivolous impeachment proceeding on the first day they win back control of the House. That’s what Dershowitz is looking forward to.
