Just so you know, hearsay is a rule of evidence that does not, and has not, apply to impeachment proceedings.
Well, while Dershowitz’ argument has been some of the best from the defense out of what I have had the chance to follow, it still seems like an extremely poor argument.
-The Founders were quite concerned with foreign interference. Here we have the executive inviting foreign interference to influence what is supposed to be an all American democratic process. Abuse of power is not a crime he says? As has been hashed out here already, the POTUS is not a normal citizen. He can’t be indicted, and impeachment is not the same as as criminal proceeding. They are trying to have it both ways.
-Separation of powers and the oversight role of Congress are as valid parts of the Constitution as Article II. We can argue about who was and wasn’t subpoenaed, but the underlying fact is that this administration has stonewalled the House, in violation of the role of the executive in the larger context of the whole government. The POTUS doesn’t get to treat the Constitution as invalid for his own convenience. Saying it is not impeachable seems… absurd. The Constitution Is the law, no?
They are trying to wave the whole thing away on a technicality in the same way they seek to wave away all evidence and testimony by imputing motives to various actors, which therefore makes all testimony void in this view. All while claiming we can’t discern the motives of Trump, and we can’t hear witnesses that can testify about those motives because, darn it, those witnesses have unsavory motives!
It looks like a pile of junk to me. Of course these things are impeachable. But I appreciate your efforts to play the role of defense here. I Do Not want to impeach anyone for frivolous reasons, even Trump, so I remain open to any rebuttals.
I was looking forward to today’s questioning. However it seems like it is only going to be softballs lobbed up by each party to their own side so they can vomit out what has already been said for the last 48 full hours of opening argument.
While BobLibDem’s point about pissing off the 70% of voters who want witnesses is valid, my concern is that their pissed-off-ness won’t be acute or long-lasting. Which of these is more likely to imagine a voter saying 9 months from now?
[ul]
[li]“I won’t vote for my Republican senator because I wanted to hear witness testimony back in January.”[/li][li]“I won’t vote for my Republican senator because he/she voted to acquit Trump despite the despicable behavior described by witnesses under oath.”[/li][/ul]
Plus, if we don’t hear from witnesses and details of Trump’s despicable behavior come out over the next few weeks and months, R senators will be able to say, “Well, if I had known THAT, I would have voted to hear from witnesses.” They’ll be full of shit, of course, but it might still be enough of a fig leaf for some voters.
The times i have heard “Whistelblower” spoken by republicans the tone has been conspiratorial and mysterious. I watch all the news channels. They have been using the very word “Whistleblower” as a red flag and red meat for their base for some reason that they never come out and say directly. They have misused the word as propoganda. To say that the issue is this single fact is ridiculous. I have watched no end of bloviating about what might happen if the wb were to be deposed. It would make no sense at all for it to be on this one single thing as you say.
If you get bored, maybe you could deal with the points about Dershowitz’s poor grasp on Constitutional history, the weakness of the “it has to be a crime” argument, and the question I’ve asked you multiple times.
You make some very good points. I don’t know for certain which will resonate more in November- allowing a sham trial or voting to acquit after a real trial. Is it better to suppress evidence and testimony or ignore them? I don’t know. In the end, I think this fall both sides will be highly motivated no matter what the Senate winds up doing.
Watching a few moments of Dershowitz- it sounded like he said that quid pro quos for political reasons are okay because everybody thinks his political interests are in the best interest of the nation. Come on, Alan, can’t you find some celebrity double murderers to defend?
That’s what the idiot king doctrine is. It means you must attribute innocence to dt until guilt has been made unavoidable by the direct testimony of witnesses who have been prevented from testifying by dt.
This is not my takeaway from Federalist no. 65, or even that segment of Federalist no. 65. The central argument in that paragraph was that you don’t want the same people presiding over two trials, because it’s not like those same people are going to change their minds the second time around, based on the same facts. You wrote so much in the paragraph above what I have quoted here.
But when you say there’s no question on the having two trials, I see that Hamilton admits it is not perfect, and concludes his essay by arguing that the proposed Constitution should not be rejected simply because the one aspect of impeachment is imperfect.
How you extrapolated different standards of proof or criminal versus civil law, I do not know.
~Max
I agree. This is boring.
But while I have your attention in this fast moving thread, I want to call attention to a question you may have missed. We were going back and forth on Hamilton’s writing that impeachable offenses aren’t necessarily crimes, but offenses against the public interest. You wrote:
In essence, Hamilton did write that, but that the Constitutional Convention disagreed with him. I responded:
Care to add anything to the assertion the Hamilton was making an argument at the convention by writing it in Federalist 65 the following year?
I agree. It’s like tee ball where the dad puts the ball on the tee so junior can knock it over the fence. The only drama left will be Friday’s witness fight, if it isn’t already settled.
Steronz made a very articulate response to this.
I don’t know why you are confused about chain of command. It goes both ways, up and down. You don’t want to sandbag your boss but you also don’t want to do it to your charges. They are both problems. In war or LE it can result in fatalities.
The arguments from you have to do with potus being the commander in chief of the various agencies. You brought this is in to buttress your case. “Commander in chief” has implied in it a “chain of command,” an actual job and actual colleagues and counterparts. You either have to accept that or give up the idea that he commands people.
dt is not a citizen. He is holding a job in the govt. If he doesn’t want to do that job he can quit. But if he decides to stay he needs to go about his business in the sunshine and not in secret.
Have you see this letter than Guiliani presented to Zelensky?
So is it your position that Guiliani was a super double secret envoy and that he misrepresented himself to Zelensky?
Hudson concerned the jurisdiction given to federal courts (the judicial power is delegated to inferior courts by Congress pursuant to Article III section 1, and limited by section 3 which requires that laws of the United States be at issue). The case is entirely inapplicable to the “jurisdiction” given to the Congress when impeaching the President or other officers, that is, to the construction of the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors”.
~Max
This question and answer thing is ridiculous. To begin with, the whole way they’re doing it is creaky. Schumer or McConnell has to recognize a Senator, the Senator has to go up to a microphone, then tells Roberts he or she has a question, the question gets sent up to Roberts, he reads it, then the person who has to answer the question has to go up to the podium and ask the question. Why not just have the questions in front of Roberts already and he can just say who the question is from?
And then the questions are ridiculous. They’re not asking anything we don’t already know the answers to.
I, personally, am willing to accept Dershowitz’s notion that Trump is just as innocent as OJ Simpson.
I think a lot of black defendants probably deserve the trump treatment. But dt doesn’t. Because the trump treatment is about being white and male basically. It would be unthinkable for the pedantry and pretzel-shaping and hysterical attributions of innocence (see Lindsey Graham on Kavanaugh) at this level to be applied to a black person.
Then why two trials? And, particularly, why two trials even when run by a genuine court of law?
The reason Dershowitz is mixed up in this Trump fiasco is that he wrote a book titled “The case against impeaching Hillary Clinton”, but the wrong person won in 2016. So rather than scrap the whole thing, he did a find and replace of Trump for Clinton. As a result he had to defend the indefensible on the book tour, which got him a plumb position as that one expert (historian, lawyer, climatologist, diplomat etc.) who all the networks love because he can provide “balance” by making arguments matches what the Republicans are saying, rather than what the consensus of 90+% of the others in their field believe.
Treason has the special privilege of being a Constitutional crime which is specifically listed, in the Constitution, as requiring two witnesses and being impeachable.
~Max