Esteemed liberal attorney and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz joined conservative commentator Mark Levin for an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News.
On Levin’s “Life, Liberty, and Levin” program, the professor and pundit discussed the ongoing effort by House Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump.
The duo of constitutional law experts cut right to the chase. Dershowitz expressed his belief that, as things stand right now, it would be “unconstitutional” and an “utter abuse of the power of Congress” for Trump to be impeached on the current charges.
The host went on to ask Dershowitz about the “bribery” that Trump is alleged to have engaged in with the president of Ukraine, which in turn led Dershowitz to compare some Democrats to Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s infamous henchman.
At one point in his rise to the top of the Communist Party, Beria was in charge of the Soviet secret police and became known for helping to purge Stalin’s political rivals.
“What they’re trying to do is what the KGB under Lavrentiy Beria said to Stalin, the dictator — I’m not comparing our country to the Soviet Union, I just want to make sure it never becomes anything like that,” Dershowitz explained.
“Beria said to Stalin, ‘Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime,’ and that’s what some of the Democrats are doing,” he said.
Dershowitz also called out Democrats for their relentless pursuit of impeachment.
“They have Trump in their sights, they want to figure out a way of impeaching him and they’re searching for a crime,” he told Levin.
“First, they came up with ‘abuse of power’ — not a crime, it’s not in the Constitution — so now they’re saying ‘bribery,’ but they’re making it up,” Dershowitz said.
“There is no case for bribery based on — even if all the allegations against the president were to be proved, which they haven’t been — but even if they were to be proved it would not constitute the impeachable offense of bribery.”
Dershowitz explained that Alexander Hamilton had specifically warned in Federalist 65 against partisan impeachments being wielded as a weapon by a tyrannical majority.
The professor even cited Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s recitation of Hamilton’s warning when he had opposed the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, Nadler and his fellow Democrats have completely forgotten or ignored their own words and Hamilton’s when it comes to partisan impeachment efforts, and indeed are now dead-set on digging up something — anything — that could be construed as an impeachable offense for the sole purpose of dislodging a president they don’t like from the White House.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul made a similar observation during a Tuesday appearance on Fox News with host Neil Cavuto, during which the Kentucky senator suggested that his Democratic counterparts were attempting to “criminalize” the presidency over policy disagreements and personal distaste for the president’s behavior.
The senator said the real “abuse of power” he had seen was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s subpoenas of phone records of ranking member Devin Nunes.
Asked if he was “embarrassed” by the president’s behavior, Paul said he was more embarrassed that “Democrats are criminalizing the presidency” and trying to overturn the 2016 election.
“This doesn’t bode well for our country,” he said.
“They say in such serious tones that this threatens democracy, but what really threatens democracy is that if we’re going to impeach every president that comes along because we don’t like their tone, or we don’t like their demeanor, or we think they’re not courteous.”
Dershowitz and Paul are right.
Motivated by their dislike for the president, Democrats are desperately searching for anything even remotely resembling a crime to impeach him over.
It’s a tyrannical move and a frightening precedent for the future that Democrats will undoubtedly come to regret.
No comments:
Post a Comment