House heads down wrong path to impeachment with investigations
By Jonathan Turley, opinion contributor — 03/06/19 10:00 AM EST
The House Judiciary Committee has fired off more than 80 subpoenas to individuals and organizations, the first salvo in its investigation of President Trump. The flurry of subpoenas seems to follow Oscar Wilde’s rule that “moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.†Yet, if the purpose of these subpoenas is impeachment, as suggested by many members, this is not the way to go about.
Faced with the prospect that special counsel Robert Mueller might not find evidence of collusion, Democrats seem to be shifting toward a range of alleged transactional and collateral crimes by Trump, including many committed before he took office. It is what the military calls “recon by fire†— shooting at any possible enemy positions to see who jumps up. Trump unquestionably presents a target-rich environment, but if Democrats continue this approach they are likely to run out of time — and the public could run out of patience.
As the last lead defense counsel in the last impeachment trial, none of this looks to me like a promising way to build an impeachment case. Such cases take focus and time to develop. Take my trial involving Judge Thomas Porteous Jr., which the judiciary transmitted to the House in June 2008. Despite being impeached unanimously by the House, the Senate trial was not completed until December 2010. That was 16 months on a case that was already investigated by the courts. There are roughly 20 months until the next presidential election, and the Democratic strategy will likely enable Trump to slow things down.
Few members of Congress, and fewer citizens, would support an effort to remove a president in his final year in office and shortly before the 2020 election. Ideally, the House committees have about 12 months to make and prosecute a case for impeachment. The fastest model was Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in which the House broke from tradition and dispensed with its own investigation. It used independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report to take articles of impeachment quickly to the House floor. That was justified on grounds that Starr supplied a detailed, lengthy record of alleged violations.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/432810-house-heads-down-wrong-path-to-impeachment-with-investigations
