Second impeachment trial of Donald Trump
196 quotes
Biography
"Because I've been a professor of Constitutional law for three decades I know there are... people... dreading endless lectures about ... Please breath easy... I remember well W. H. Auden's line that a professor is someone who speaks while other people are sleeping."
"You will not be hearing extended lectures from me, because our case is based on cold hard facts. It's all about the facts."
"President Trump has sent his lawyers here today to try to stop the Senate from hearing the facts of this case. They want to call the trial over before any of its evidence is even introduced."
"Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with Constitutional impunity. You get away with it. ...[C]onduct that would be a high crime and misdemeanor in your first year as president, in your second... in your third... and for the vast majority of your fourth year as president, you can suddenly do, in your last few weeks in office, without facing any Constitutional accountability at all. This would create a brand new January exception to the Constitution of the United States of America."
"[E]verybody can see immediately why this is so dangerous. It's an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, including using violent means to lock that door; to hang on to the at all costs, and to block the peaceful transfer of power."
"In other words, the January exception is an invitation to our Founders' worst nightmare..."
"[I]f we buy this radical argument that president Trump's lawyers advance, we risk allowing January 6th to become our future."
"What will the January exception mean to the future generations if you grant it?"
"Senators, the president was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on January 13th for doing that. You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution. That's a high crime and misdemeanor. If that's not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing, and if the president's arguments for a January exception are upheld, then even if everyone agrees that he's culpable for these events, even if the evidence proves, as we think it definitively does, that the president incited a violent insurrection on the day Congress met to finalize the Presidential election, he would have you believe there is absolutely nothing the Senate can do about it. No trial! No facts!"
"He wants you to decide that the Senate is powerless at that point. That can't be right."
"The transition of power is always the most dangerous moment for democracy. Every historian will tell you that. We just saw it in the most astonishing way. We lived through it. ...The Framers of the Constitution knew it. That's why they created a Constitution with an oath written into it that binds the President from his very first day in office, until his very last day in office, and every day in between."
"Under that Constitution, and under that oath, the... President of the United States is forbidden to commit high crimes and misdemeanors against the people at any point that he's in office. Indeed, that's one specific reason the impeachment conviction and disqualification powers exist: to protect us against presidents who try to overrun the power of the people in their elections, and replace the rule of law with the rule of mobs. These powers must apply, even if the president commits his offenses in his final weeks in office. ...[T]hat's precisely when we need them the most, because that's when elections get attacked."
"Everything that we know about the language of the Constitution, the Framers' original understanding and intent, prior Senate practice, and common sense confirms this rule."
"Let's start with the text of the Constitution, which in Article I, section II gives the House "the sole Power of Impeachment" when the President commits high crimes and misdemeanors. We exercised that power on January 13th. The president, it is undisputed, committed his offense while he was president, and it is undisputed that we impeached him while he was president. There can be no doubt that this is a valid and legitimate impeachment; and there can be no doubt that the Senate has the power to try this... impeachment. We know this because Article I, section III gives the Senate the sole power to try all impeachments."
"The Senate has the... sole power to try all impeachments."
"All means all, and there are no exceptions to the rule."
"Because the Senate has jurisdiction to try all impeachments, it most certainly has jurisdiction to try this one."
"It's really that simple. The vast majority of all Constitutional scholars who studied the question and weighed in on the proposition being advanced by the president, this January exception heretofore unknown, agree with us. ...[T]hat includes the nation's most prominent conservative legal scholars, including former tenth circuit judge Michael McConnell, the co-founder of the , Steven Calabresi, president Reagan's Solicitor General , luminary Washington lawyer Charles Cooper, among hundreds of other constitutional lawyers and professors. I commend... their recent writings to you, in the newspapers over the last several days."
"In all of the key precedents, along with detailed explanation of the constitutional history and textual analysis, appear in the trial brief we filed last week and the reply brief that we filed very early this morning. ...I want to highlight a few key points from constitutional history... compelling in foreclosing president Trump's argument that there's a secret January exception hidden... in the Constitution."
"[A]s Hamilton wrote, England provided "the model from which the idea of this institution has been borrowed" and it would have been immediately obvious to anyone familiar with that history that former officials could be held accountable for their [previous] abuses while in office."
"Every single impeachment of a government official that occurred during the Framers' lifetime concerned a former official."
"[T]he most famous of these impeachments occurred while the Framers gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution. It was the impeachment of ... a corrupt guy. ...[T]he Framers knew all about it, and they strongly supported the impeachment. In fact, the Hastings case was invoked at the Convention. It was the only specific impeachment case that they discussed at the Convention. It played a key role in their adoption of the high crimes and misdemeanors standard. ...[E]ven though everyone there surely knew that Hastings had left office two years before his impeachment trial began, not a single framer ...raised a concern when ...George Mason held up the Hastings impeachment as a model for us in the writing of our Constitution."
"The early state constitutions supported the idea too. Every single state constitution in the 1780s either specifically said that former officials could be impeached, or were entirely consistent with the idea."
"In contrast, not a single state constitution prohibited trials of former officials."
"As a result, there was an overwhelming presumption in favor of allowing legislatures to hold former officials accountable... Any departure from that norm would have been a big deal, and yet there's no sign anywhere that... ever happened."