Harvard Law Professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz completely disagrees with his “friend and colleague” Laurence Tribe on the issue of withholding the articles of impeachment against President Trump from a Senate trial.
Dershowitz remarked that it is hard for him to imagine “anything more unconstitutional” than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refusing to forward the articles of impeachment as expected, following the partisan House vote along party lines, in an effort to affect the Senate trial proceedings.
Dershowitz referred to Tribe’s suggestion that “the Senate not conduct a trial — at least not now,” in an opinion piece published in Newsmax Thursday.
“He would withhold the trial until the Senate agreed to change its rules, or presumably until a new election put many more Democrats in the Senate. Under his proposal, there might never be a Senate trial, but the impeachment would stand as a final and permanent condemnation of President Trump,” he wrote.
“It is difficult to imagine anything more unconstitutional, more violative of the intention of the Framers, more of a denial of basic due process and civil liberties, more unfair to the president and more likely to increase the current divisiveness among the American people. Put bluntly, it is hard to imagine a worse idea put forward by good people,” he added.
Pelosi gloated over the outcome of months of “inquiry” by the Democrats following a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine.
“He just got impeached. He’ll be impeached forever. No matter what the Senate does. He’s impeached forever because he violated our Constitution,” she told the Associated Press. “If I did nothing else, he saw the power of the gavel there. And it wasn’t me, it was all of our members making their own decision.”
Pelosi insists partisan gavel banging means Trump’s ‘impeached forever’, Dem lawyer bursts her bubble https://t.co/aC8uZ8DS1K
— Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) December 20, 2019
The Democrat leader criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for saying he was “working in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office.” And Tribe accused the Kentucky Republican of conducting a “whitewash” trial and “letting the president and his legal team call the shots.”
But Dershowitz condemned the idea of denying Trump a trial in the Senate.
“President Trump would stand accused of two articles of impeachment without having an opportunity to be acquitted by the institution selected by the Framers to try all cases of impeachment. It would be as if a prosecutor deliberately decided to indict a criminal defendant but not to put him on trial,” he wrote.
Tribe’s hypothesis “fails on its face,” Dershowitz argued, adding how the impeachment has political elements.
“I cannot imagine Pelosi or Tribe proposing this jerry-rigged unconstitutional gambit had Hillary Clinton been elected president, and had a Republican House impeached her,” he wrote.
“The proper response is not to distort, ignore and violate the explicit terms of the Constitution that view impeachment by the House as a first step toward a trial by the Senate. An impeached president has a right to be tried and acquitted by the Senate,” Dershowitz noted.
“Denying him and the American people that fundamental right might serve the temporary interests of the Democratic Party, and academics who support it,” he added, “but would do violence to the rule of constitutional law that is supposed to serve all Americans, regardless of party or ideology.”
Dershowitz’s message echoes what many Republican members of Congress have been arguing:
Dems called it an emergency. They had to rush the impeachment through Congress.
Now AFTER a sham impeachment process, they’re going to wait to send the actual Articles to the Senate?
They don’t take the Constitution seriously. This is all about attacking the President.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 19, 2019
Whether you agree with impeachment or not, Trump Derangement Syndrome has reached a new level.
House Democrats refusing to send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate because they don’t like the way we may do the trial – that is just scary.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 19, 2019
The real abuse of power comes from House Democrats. During this #ShamImpeachment, they:
❌ Broke every House rule that stood in their way
❌ Denied due process
❌ Sidelined the courtsNow they’re demanding control over Senate trial procedures!
— Doug Collins (@RepDougCollins) December 20, 2019
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Frieda@bizpacreview.com
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.
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