Presidential Misconduct: Some Historical Perspective
By David Harsanyi
December 5, 2019 6:30 AM
If you think Trump’s behavior is the worst in American history, you might be insane.
This week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee trotted out a trio of dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of Donald Trump was justified. They were there to bring a veneer of gravitas and erudition to what’s been, until now, a highly partisan affair.
But however smart people such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t immune from peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s conduct was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,†we no longer had any intellectual obligation to take him seriously on the topic.
Because while I’m certainly not a distinguished professor, I am very confident that history began before 2016. Which means that, even if I concede Gerhardt’s framing of Trump’s actions — bribery, extortion, etc. — I can rattle off at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse†than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-hearings-presidential-misconduct-historical-perspective/
