Why Does this Harvard Law Professor Want Trump Impeached?

My friend Gene Healy from the Cato Institute calls Laurence Tribe the “dean of con-law [constitutional law] professors,” but can’t understand Tribe’s fascination with impeaching President Trump. Tribe, who teaches at Harvard, typically takes a more balanced approach to the law. In 2015 he was excoriating the EPA’s greenhouse gas emissions plan in front of Congress. But now he has spent months calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump. Healy writes:

Former labor secretary Robert Reich says we should impeach Trump for “abridging the freedom of the press” by … calling the media names and “choosing who he invites to news conferences.” In his rushed-to-publication tome, The Case for Impeachment, American University’s Allan J. Lichtman argues that Trump can be removed for the “crime against humanity” of global-warming skepticism.

Are these really the sorts of offenses that qualify as “high Crimes and Misdemeanors”? To divine the meaning of that phrase, it would help to have the guidance of a preeminent constitutional scholar — someone such as Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, whose treatise American Constitutional Law has been “cited more than any other legal text since 1950.”

Unfortunately, Trump’s election seems to have rattled Tribe hard enough to knock loose both his constitutional standards and his sense of proportion. The dean of con-law professors has spent the administration’s opening months frantically hurling charges at Trump, and managing mainly to impeach his own reputation in the process.

Impeachment “Should Begin On Inauguration Day,” Tribe declared in December; by January 28, he had concluded that Trump “must be impeached for abusing his power and shredding the Constitution more monstrously than any other president in American history” — pretty impressive for a man entering the second week of his presidency.

In the first months of Trump’s tenure, Tribe floated everything from violations of the Emoluments Clauseto the “cruel brand of bigotry” that supposedly motivates the travel ban to a State Department blogpost touting the “winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, even suggesting that the president could be defenestrated on the basis of a single tweet: his March 4 claim that Obama had his “wires tapped” in Trump Tower. When law professor Johnathan Turley laughed off the idea on Morning Joe, back in March, Tribe had a mini-conniption on Twitter: “Using power of WH to falsely accuse [Obama of an] impeachable felony does qualify as an impeachable offense whether via tweet or not,” he huffed.

What’s funny about all this is, when it was Bill Clinton’s political life on the line, Tribe nearly threw his back out trying to raise the constitutional bar for removal. In his November 1998 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Tribe insisted that “an impeachable offense must itself severely threaten the system of government or constitute a grievous abuse of official power or both.” Perjury and obstruction to cover up an illicit affair weren’t nearly grave enough.

Hell, back then even murder was a close call in Tribe’s eyes, if the president did the deed himself, for personal reasons. In his testimony, Tribe emphasized the fact that “when Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in July 1804 … Burr served out his term, which ended in early 1805,” without getting impeached. “There may well be room to argue,” Tribe grudgingly conceded, that a contemporary president could be impeached for an extracurricular homicide — but that exception “must not be permitted to swallow [the] rule.” Whack a guy in Weehawken and we might have to let you get away with it; lie about him on Twitter, though, and you’ve got to go.

Charges of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” are often just a debater’s dodge, used to change the subject from the president’s behavior to his critics’ alleged hang-ups. Spend any time following Laurence Tribe on social media, though, and you’ll begin to think of it as an actual, clinical condition.

E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

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E.J. Smith is the Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH, where he completed course-work in Practical and Defensive Handgun, Conceal Carry Pistol, Shotguns, Precision Scope Rifle and Kidnapping Prevention. E.J. plays a Yamaha Recording Custom drum set with Zilldjian cymbals. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com. Sign up here to receive all the best content from Richardcyoung.com each week.