Excerpts from article:
...Critically, the Constitution only authorizes impeachment of the President for treason, bribery, or comparable "Other high crimes and misdemeanors." The Constitutional convention expressly rejected the use of impeachment for "Maladministration." As ably articulated and argued by jurists, scholars and counselors at law since the very founding of the country, a President cannot be impeached for what he cannot be indicted.
...That disgraceful dishonor must be reserved for the wrongful impeachment of President Trump.
...The specific textual limitations on impeachable offense could have no meaning except to "Prove that no person can be impeached except for an offense." Indeed, "Impeachment is a criminal prosecution and cannot be maintained without the proof of some offense against the law," a principle which "Pervades all the other provisions of the Constitution on the subject of impeachment." References to the pardon power, to conviction, to subsequent post-impeachment criminal prosecutorial power - it all reveals the Constitution's intent to limit impeachment to a peculiar form of criminal conduct.
..."Noscitur a sociis. High crimes and misdemeanors; so high that they belong in his company with treason and bribery." In addition, it beggars logic and justice alike that where "There must be some law; otherwise there is no crime." Why else would impeachment be referenced in the power to pardon, if not based on criminally offensive conduct? Were it otherwise, we could have impeachment "By no crime" and a trial "By no court," subjecting the people's elected President to the capricious whim of Congress, a Parliamentary form of power the Constitution directly discarded.
...Without immediate dismissal of the impeachment proceedings here, the same infamy that followed the Johnson impeachment might be met with the same consequence Justice Curtis warned against a century-and-a-half ago: "Of that injustice which is sure to be discovered and which makes even the wise man mad, and which, in the fixed and immutable order of God's providence, is certain to return to plague its inventors."
Submitted 1548 days ago
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