The Case for Donald Trump's Impeachability

[DonViejo]

By Jesse Singal

December 20, 2016
8:33 a.m.

Before Donald Trump got elected, few Americans had heard of or paid much attention to the Emoluments Clause, a previously obscure-to-most-of-us provision in Article I of the Constitution dealing with corruption and curry-favoring at the hands of foreign governments. In the wake of his election, though, a growing chorus of voices, many of them legal experts, began debating about whether the wording of the clause could render Trump impeachable, more or less from the moment he is sworn in.

This conversation has ramped up in large part because Trump himself has insisted that should he choose to take office without divesting from his extensive, tangled business holdings — and that certainly appears to be his plan at the moment — it won’t be a problem. “I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business,” Trump famously told the New York Times last month. “The law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

The Emoluments Clause is an important Yeah, but … response: Yes, some legal experts have argued, the president is exempt from certain federal conflict-of-interest laws that apply to other public servants. But he isn’t exempt from the Emoluments Clause — if he doesn’t divest, he’ll be violating that and could be impeached. Now, this isn’t a unanimous view. Last month, for example, Maynooth University law professor Seth Barrett Tillman argued that it isn’t clear the Emoluments Clause applies to elected officials like the president, as opposed to appointed ones. He also pointed out an instance in which George Washington apparently received foreign gifts without much protest from even his enemies, and, “As Professor Akhil Amar has reminded us, the precedents set by President Washington and his administration deserve special deference in regard to both foreign affairs and presidential etiquette.”

Last Friday, the Brookings Institute released a very helpful 23-page paper that serves as a rather forceful rebuttal to Tillman’s interpretation. The authors argue that a common-sense reading of the Constitution and the relevant legal theory and history all lead to the conclusion that Trump is, in fact, subject to the Emoluments Clause, and could therefore be walking into an unusual sort of constitutional danger zone. The paper was written by a bipartisan trio of legal experts who have been active in this discussion: Norman L. Eisen, a Brookings fellow, the chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, and a former chief White House ethics lawyer under Obama; Richard Painter, a vice-chair at CREW and former chief White House lawyer under George W. Bush; and Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law professor at Harvard.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/the-case-for-donald-trumps-impeachability.html

[ananda]

1. Trump is a traitor and a criminal.

So there's ALWAYS been a case for his arrest,
and now impeachment ...

... just no functioning justice system to make
or legislature to make it happen.

[pbmus]

2. What does the Trumpster care about emolents, what is that to me?

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[world wide wally]

4. And his supporters love it

Because they are....what's the wor?...oh yeah. STUPID

[unblock]

3. the problem is impeachment is, in practice, a political act, not a legal one.

if congress hates the president, they might try to impeach and remove.
if congress likes the president, they why would they?

bill clinton is clearly an example of that hatred, so much so that they went rather out of their way to find an offense they could deem impeachable, but that was just political cover for simply wanting to damage and possibly get rid of him.

there are more examples of the opposite effect, whether congress was content enough with the president to not both impeaching despite having plenty of impeachable offenses to use as justification.


in this case, a republican congress isn't going to impeach donnie unless and until donnie screws *them*. screwing us? the country? tradition? ethics? what do they care. unless and until it costs them political not to impeach, they won't do it.

[Thor_MN]

5. The GOP Congress will happily let Trump wreck things, then throw him under the bus.

They will claim that he was never really a Republican. They probably will not impeach him to redshirt Pence, but they will keep it in their backpocket, in case they need to disown him quickly.

[unblock]

6. yup. for republicans, donnie's not a problem until he's a big, big problem.

for the rest of us, he's already a complete disaster, but we don't matter, apparently.