Few American legal thinkers have had the sort of clout and experience that former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has had. Now he’s warning Republicans they need to find a stronger case if they are going to build a case to impeach President Joe Biden.
Dershowitz knows a thing or two about impeachments considering that he represented former President Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial in 2020. He noted at Trump’s impeachment trial that the law scholars who endorsed impeaching the then-president did so for purely partisan reasons.
He argued for a higher standard of demonstrating that an “abuse of power” had taken place.
“The Framers rejected vague open-ended criteria, abuse of power,” Dershowitz said at Trump’s impeachment trial, noting that matters such as “maladministration” as president were not seen by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution as reasons to give Congress the power to impeach a president. “They did not agree to decide to give Congress a license for who to impeach and who not to impeach on partisan grounds.
He continued: “I read to you a list of 40 American presidents who were guilty of what people called an abuse of power. Should every one of them be impeached? Should every one of them have been removed from office?”
During the trial, Dershowitz argued that a president could only be impeached and removed from office for a serious crime like bribery or treason.
Republicans Repeating Democrat Mistakes With Biden Impeachment Effort
Rep. Lauren Boebert’s, R-Colo., resolution to impeach Biden claims he should be impeached and removed from office for the “abuse of power” and for “dereliction of duty” due to his failure to enforce immigration law.
“Now some of these same Republicans are supporting Biden’s impeachment on grounds similar to the ones they rejected when they were directed against the Republican president: “Abuse of power” (Article I), and “dereliction of duty.” (Article II),” Dershowitz writes in a new column in The Hill. “These alleged grounds do not appear in the Constitution, and the second one was implicitly rejected by the Constitutional Convention when proposals to include ‘malpractice for neglect of duty,’ ‘neglect in the execution of his office’ and ‘maladministration’ were withdrawn at the insistence of James Madison, the father of our Constitution.
Dershowitz continued: “Once again partisanship trumps principle, and consistently is regarded as a weakness in the game of political hardball.”
GOP Should Investigate Joe Biden Bribery Allegations Further
He notes the allegations surrounding Joe Biden’s potential involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings could potentially fit what the Framers were after when they wrote the Constitution.
The recently disclosed FBI FD-1023 form alleges that the president received $5 million from the corrupt Ukrainian energy firm Burisma in exchange for him pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin while he was vice president. He had Burisma in his sights and placed it under investigation at the time of firing. Ironically, Trump’s phone call asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden’s effort to fire Shokin triggered his own impeachment.
That, if it could be verified, would provide a textbook reason for impeaching and removing the president.
Dershowitz, however, thinks it is a constitutional question whether Joe Biden the private citizen can be impeached for questionable acts committed while he was a private citizen.
“The irony is that there might actually be constitutionally valid grounds for impeaching President Biden under two possible circumstances: 1) if it turns out that Biden’s son, Hunter, was actually sitting next to his father and was aware that he invoked the former vice president’s name when he communicated a threat to a Chinese businessman; and 2) if a high crime committed by a former vice president and future president during his interregnum as a private citizen can satisfy the criteria for impeachment. The first is a question of fact; the second is a matter of constitutional interpretation,” Dershowitz wrote.
He continued: “If Republican House members are determined to impeach Biden, they should focus their investigative resources on specific allegations of serious crimes which, if true, may rise to the level of possibly impeachable offense. It will not do to rely on vague, partisan accusations of misconduct which, even if true, would not satisfy the criteria for impeaching and removing a duly elected president, as they themselves recently argued.”
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
From 19FortyFive
AOC Just Proved How Stupid She Is
