Trump tweet about impeachment confuses political conclusions with legal ones

[orangecrush]

"Whether Trump broke any criminal laws is formally irrelevant to whether the House has the constitutional authority to impeach him."




April 23, 2019, 2:33 PM ET
By Steve Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas School of Law

"It seems increasingly likely, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, that there will never be widespread agreement about whether President Donald Trump engaged in any criminal activity arising out of Russian interference in the 2016 election — and the subsequent investigation into that interference. Perhaps with that in mind, the tweeter-in-chief took to social media on Monday to declare that “Only high crimes and misdemeanors can lead to impeachment. There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach.” Fortunately for the president, he’s not taking my constitutional law class. If he were, he’d be in serious danger of failing.

Link to tweet

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The first sentence of Trump’s tweet is (somewhat) accurate; Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provides that “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But there are two critical reasons why it does not follow from this text that Congress “can’t impeach” if “[t]here were no crimes.”


The first reason is the historical understanding of the Constitution’s text. The term “other high crimes and misdemeanors” was understood by the Constitution’s drafters to not refer only to criminal activity. In pre-revolutionary England, the term was used to refer to various forms of official misconduct, including maladministration, that did not (and could not) carry criminal consequences. The Constitution’s drafting history similarly reflects the Founders’ view that the remedy was not limited to those crimes Congress had elsewhere proscribed.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, impeachable offenses arose from “the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/ncna997641