Alan Dershowitz: Are congressional investigations of Trump the new McCarthyism?
By Alan Dershowitz, opinion contributor — 05/22/19 10:00 AM EDT
When I came of age during the 1950s, liberals and civil libertarians were deeply concerned about the abuses of congressional investigations to expose communists and “fellow travelers.†Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was using congressional committees to do his dirty work.
Committee leaders would claim that they had legitimate legislative purposes in subpoenaing actors, professors, and government employees to interrogate them about their past political affiliations. The purported purposes were to legislate more effective controls over communist influence in our government and to conduct oversight of the executive branch. Most liberals and civil libertarians saw through this ruse. The obvious purpose was to expose, embarrass, and unemploy left wing individuals associated with the Communist Party during the 1930s.
My law professor, mentor, and friend at the time, Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, wrote a masterful critique of these bogus congressional hearings entitled “The Grand Inquest.†In it he provided an extensive history of the misuse of hearings for partisan and ideological purposes. He called for reform, including judicial oversight of congressional excesses. A young liberal lawyer named Abner Mikva, who became a distinguished federal judge, wrote a glowing review of the book, though he criticized Taylor for not going far enough and not being enough of a civil libertarian.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/444959-alan-dershowitz-are-investigations-of-trump-the-new-mccarthyism
