Trump Lawyers Argue Abuse of Power Isn’t a Thing When It Comes to Impeachment. History Says Otherwis

[EasyAce]

By Gene Healy
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/trump-lawyers-argue-abuse-power-isnt-thing-when-it-comes-impeachment

President Trump added some star power to his defense team Friday, with celebrity defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz and former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr joining the squad. Then over the weekend, we got a preview of the president’s case against impeachment, in the form of a 110‐​page “trial memorandum” drafted by Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow and White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

The good news for fans of legal combat is that the Senate trial promises to be entertaining. The bad news is that the Trump team’s constitutional arguments can barely pass a straight‐​face test . . . In its trial brief, the Trump defense team responds by calling abuse of power a “novel,” “concocted” and “made‐​up theory” that “fails to state an impeachable offense because it does not rest on a violation of an established law.”

All of this would have been news to James Madison, “Father of the Constitution” and a central figure in the debates over its impeachment clauses . . . Madison understood “high crimes and misdemeanors” to cover lawful but otherwise abusive exercises of presidential power, like corrupt pardons or “wanton removal of meritorious officers.”

. . . The Trump team’s notion that impeachment requires a “violation of established law” is itself novel. As Justice Joseph Story noted in 1833, since the Constitution’s ratification, no one had been heard to argue that impeachable offenses were limited to what could be found “in the statute book of the Union" . . . for sheer chutzpah, nothing compares to the Trump attorneys’ assertion that abuse of power is a “novel” theory of impeachment — it’s actually impeachment’s core . . .