https://twitter.com/twt/status/1220099650461392896
guy is seriously the biggest faggot smarmy scammer on the planet. and just so happens to represent the fakest place of all, Hollywood. cant make it up
https://twitter.com/twt/status/1220099650461392896
guy is seriously the biggest faggot smarmy scammer on the planet. and just so happens to represent the fakest place of all, Hollywood. cant make it up
i'm genuinely curious about any cites you may have. every article i'm reading says the opposite. the constitution gives the senate the sole power to "try" all impeachments. since all trials have witnesses, wouldn't it be more logical to assume that an actual trial was what was intended? why use the word "try" if not? i've never heard of a jury issuing a judgment on an entirely written record as the senate wasn't there for the house proceedings.
My understanding.
The house presents a prima facie case, and there is no reason whatsoever to limit evidence and attempt to convict on the basis of this hearing alone.
New evidence rightly must be presented... but alas the trial should not be carried out like an investigation, and should not stray from the initial prima facie charges.
Kinda ironic he doesn't want witnesses considering he's charged with obstruction. These folks who were told to say nothing are key witnesses in proving guilt or innocence.
So much talk on what the founding fathers would be thinking.
I think they'd be turning in the graves, if a president used his position to elicit bogus dirt from a foreign country, on a political opponent. Like seriously, this would have been right up there on the list of shit they would detest, and not tolerate under any circumstance.
If he can pull off no witnesses he's a political god, and made impeachment a useless absurdity.
Are your people going to be happy with a sham trial with no witnesses?
My gut says there will be a huge blow-back on the spineless sheep voting to GOP orders.
But as everyone has noted, he runs super good and anything is possible with the right spin.
Very entertaining presidency!
Last edited by Salty_Aus; 01-23-2020 at 07:26 AM. Reason: Yeah my spelling is shit
Teddy Kennedy did just that to try to defeat Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton and the DNC took money from the Chinese government to assist his reelection campaign. Shall i keep going. Again, educate yourselves, worst thing that happens is you disagree with this constitutional scholar:
I don't watch that clown he's unbearable. Reads the same script as your genius president... has no credibility.
If you're cool with him and his buddies trying to get bullshit dirt on Biden I can respect that.
I guess covering it up is a basic human nature thing. Not a huge deal?
Carrying on like a poor innocent victim doesn't sit well with me though.
Your stance is yeah he's guilty but I don't care it's no big deal right?... I'm sure you've said something along these lines.... I think
i watched the first half but didn't see anything on whether the senate should have witnesses or not. did he touch on that?
on another note, if you think about it, the notion that a president can't be impeached for an abuse of power leads to crazy results. could trump openly tell ukraine that they're not getting military aid unless they arrest hunter biden? could he give alaska to russia? really?
the notion that you need a crime for impeachment of a president is not widely accepted
it doesn't.
great article here explaining that the phrase was a term of art, stolen from the english.
"Great Britain has never had a written constitution. And Parliament has never sat down to write an impeachment statute with a neat definition of the behavior that could get a royal minister impeached. Rather, Parliament has carefully kept impeachment open-ended, recognizing that one never knew in advance what form the royal urge to autocracy might take or what sort of devilry corrupt or ambitious officials might be up to. Over the centuries, Parliament impeached a good many people for a wide variety of misconduct. When it did, the articles of impeachment tended to describe the defendant’s behavior as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a usage that dates back to 1386. Critically, a great deal of the misconduct Parliament deemed impeachable wasn’t criminal at all, at least in the sense of violating any preexisting criminal statute or constituting any judge-created common-law crime."
I could provide examples in eye-glazing antiquarian detail. Suffice it to say that Parliament has impeached high officials for military mismanagement (Lord Latimer, 1376; the Earl of Suffolk, 1386; the Duke of Buckingham, 1626; and the Earl of Strafford, 1640), neglect of duty or sheer ineptitude (Attorney General Henry Yelverton; Lord Treasurer Middlesex, 1624; the Earl of Clarendon, 1667; Lord Danby, 1678; and Edward Seymour, treasurer of the Navy, 1680), and giving the sovereign bad advice, especially about foreign affairs (William de la Pole, 1450; Lords Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Strafford, 1715).
Parliament has also impeached a good many officers for abuse of power, sometimes criminal, but oftentimes not. When the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, the English-speaking world was riveted by the commencement of impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, governor general of Bengal, on just such grounds. Few if any of the charges against Hastings were indictable crimes, but that was immaterial to Edmund Burke, the principal parliamentary prosecutor of Hastings. He said the charges “were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice, which are our rule and our birthright: his offenses are not in formal, technical language, but in reality, in substance and effect, High Crimes and High Misdemeanors.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...y-mean/600343/
the articles showing this are absolutely endless.
to make the case even clearer, look at what the founding fathers actually thought of impeachment:
"Moreover, the founders, both during the ratification period and afterward, identified multiple noncriminal acts they believed to be impeachable. At the Virginia ratifying convention, James Madison and Wilson Nicholas said abuse of the pardon power would be impeachable. Impeachment, some founders said, would also follow from receipt of foreign emoluments or presidential efforts to secure by trickery Senate ratification of a disadvantageous treaty. During the first Congress of 1789, Madison even argued that presidents could be impeached for “wanton removal of meritorious officers.”
In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton made the larger point that impeachment is directed at “political” offenses that “proceed from … the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He was echoed by the foremost of the first generation of commentators on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story, who observed in his 1833 treatise Commentaries on the Constitution that impeachable conduct is often “purely political,” and that “no previous statute is necessary to authorize an impeachment for any official misconduct.”
thus, as you can see. trump literally has no defense.
-fin
AD says there’s clear evidence that the framers looked at abuse of power (among other things) as being an impeachable offense but chose not to include it because the term is too ambiguous. Many presidents have been accused of AOP in history, think if they were all impeached. Going down this road every future president that doesn’t control the House will probably be impeached. That’s why I go back to my point they should have charged Trump with bribery. That’s basically what they’re saying he did anyway.
Last edited by nightmarefish; 01-23-2020 at 10:04 AM.
There's a solid argument that 'high crimes' refers to a crime that only someone in a position of power could be guilty of - someone that has influence over the people who enforce or interpret the law (executive branch and judiciary people).
Congress makes the laws, but don't enforce or interpret them. So if they get indicted, they have no influence on being prosecuted or judged, so they can't be impeached.
Judges and Executive officials could abuse their power to avoid being indicted or found guilty or what the sentence is, so we need a way to check their power - that's why impeachment exists.
Last edited by duped_samaritan; 01-23-2020 at 10:29 AM.
dershowitz isn't just wrong, he's lying to you about what he really believes.
remember this is the guy who said abuse of power is impeachable before he joined the trump legal team. what does that tell you?
what the founders looked at was whether to include "maladministrstion" as an impeachable offense. i.e., policy differences.
they ultimately decided that maladminstration made it too easy to remove a president but wanted something less than actual crimes, so they decided on "high crimes and misdemeanors" which they understood included abuse of power.
look at it this way -- the founders specifically included two crimes as impeachable offenses -- bribery and treason. why did they do that?
if, like trump suggests, "high crimes and misdemeanors" means any crime, than why spell out bribery and treason? wouldn't "high crimes and misdemeanors" already include bribery and treason?
of course it would. the only logical conclusion is that high crimes and misdemeanors means something other than any crime.
i've pointed to what the founders actually thought. if someone has contrary authority -- something showing that they thought only crimes are impeachable offenses, i'd be interested in seeing it.
also there's a reason the democrats didn't include bribery against trump. they didn't think trump committed it. don't you think if they thought he committed bribery, it would be in the articles of impeachment?
Last edited by blake; 01-23-2020 at 10:33 AM.
Many of them claimed he committed bribery and still do.
My take on the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” are unforeseen crimes that they didn’t specifically look at. Abuse of power was looked at and they decided not to specifically include it.
Your take is that Alan Dershowitz is lying as to what he really thinks? I guess the question would be why would he do that. Isn’t he a life long Dem? Maybe someone is blackmailing him with Epstein tapes.
I hate this whole impeachment thing and hope it goes away. I don’t view it as productive. It’s shit for these blue state people to run on at home that will have no tangible effect on the general election imo.
That said, Dershowitz is, and has always been, someone who gets off on being a celebrity lawyer. You think he truly believes OJ was innocent? He served as an adviser to the defense team on that. Why would he do that? You think he didn’t value celebrity and staying in the news above his social circle shunning him then?
With Rudy or Dershowitz or any of these high profile guys, there is nothing worse than being out of the game after decades of being a player. This is an articulate guy who has argued cases forever, yet you saw in that cnn interview when confronted with his past statements, he was spinning because he knows he’s full of shit. He doesn’t care. He’ll argue anything for anyone to be relevant over any political views he may have held whenever.
gee why would alan change his mind about whether abuse of process is impeachable at this time? oh i don't know.... just spitballing here but maybe cause he's a television whore who is an attorney representing trump in the impeachment case? he's actually ethically bound not to say anything to harm his client.
i appreciate your take on abuse of process, but it seems like you're ignoring everything i'm saying.
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