Bill
Knight column for 8-5, 6 or 7, 2019
Why bother?
Petitions with 10 million signatures were presented to
Congress in May; in Illinois, U.S. Reps. Sean Casten and Jan Schakowsky (who
previously opposed impeachment) have joined some 114 House members favoring it;
the NAACP convention on July 24 unanimously voted in favor of impeachment; the
independent Quinnipiac poll shows 46 percent of Americans think Trump has
broken the law since taking office; Special Counselor Robert Mueller recently
repeated that his investigation didn’t exonerate the President and confirmed
that Trump could be prosecuted if he weren’t President; and 1,000-plus former
federal prosecutors, many Republicans, signed an open letter saying that Trump
would be charged with multiple felonies if he weren’t President. (One of them,
ex-U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, said, “Based on my experience of more than
25 years as a federal prosecutor, if anyone other than a President committed
this conduct, he would be under indictment today for multiple acts of
obstruction of justice.”)
Incidentally, legal experts disagree. Constitutional scholar
Laurence Tribe, author of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” cited
the Constitution (Article I, Section 3) stating, “The Party convicted [by the
Senate in an impeachment case] shall nevertheless be liable and subject to
indictment.”
That’s “be,” not “WILL be.”
On Capitol Hill, U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), chair of
the House Judiciary Committee, said the president “deserves impeachment … he’s violated
the law six ways from Sunday.
“There can be no higher stakes than this attempt to abrogate
all power to the executive branch, away from Congress and, more importantly,
the American people,” said Nadler, a lawyer. “The choice is simple, We can
stand up to this President in defense of the country and the Constitution and
the liberty we love, or we can let the moment pass.”
NO! THERE’S A THIRD CHOICE.
OK, arguably, the republic is at risk. But Mueller’s probe
seemingly reported something more pedestrian but potentially more powerful than
Russian collusion: reasons to conclude Trump obstructed justice. Obstruction of
justice occurs, prosecutors say, when something CAN be obstructed, there’s a
LINK between it and a person’s attempts to do so, and that person KNEW of the
connection.
More importantly, the violation’s statute of limitations is
five years from the date of the crime.
So: the Judiciary Committee can still examine evidence, take
testimony, deliberate and make its findings public, and they can do so
announcing upfront that ITS INTENTION IS NOT TO IMPEACH but to turn over its
proof of misconduct to authorities like the U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York, the office that prosecuted Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and
Russian attorney Natalya Veselnitskaya and is investigating Trump’s inaugural
committee, hush-money payments, Trump family actions with Deutsche Bank and
more.
The Constitution assigns Congress the difficult
responsibility of holding Presidents accountable, saying a President “shall be
removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery or
other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And Founder Alexander Hamilton in “The
Federalist Papers” wrote, “The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses
which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the
abuse or violation of some public trust,” Hamilton wrote. “They are of a nature
which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate
chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
Tribe said, “If this is not impeachable behavior, then for
all time we will have established the precedent that the President can get away
with anything.”
However: a U.S. Senate with 53 Republicans hasn’t shown a willingness
to confront Trump.
“Our job is to protect the rule of law,” Nadler said, so allegations
of crime must be proven, “serious” and it “cannot be seen to be partisan.”
It’s increasingly more patriotic than partisan. This spring,
11 conservative attorneys signed a letter saying, “The President’s conduct
demonstrates a flagrant disregard for the rule of law.” One of them, George H.
W. Bush’s Deputy Attorney General Donald B. Ayer, said, “It’s really kind of
tyrannical. It’s un-American. It’s the sort of expansion of government power
you would expect Republicans to worry about.”
America could be convinced Trump’s a crook.
Watergate hearings persuaded people that Nixon should be
lawfully ousted. In January of 1974, 19 percent of the public favored removing
him; by that August, it was 57 percent.
Apart from impeachment, holding anyone responsible for
wrongdoing takes proof.
And prosecutors.
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