Democrats from the House Judiciary Committee invited three legal scholars to the impeachment proceedings Wednesday to determine whether President Donald Trump’s maladministration warranted impeachment.
The constitutional scholars feverishly sparred over case evidence and found that Trump’s conduct amounted to the worst behavior of a U.S. President in history. His efforts to obstruct justice and solicit a foreign investigation into 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden met the constitutional threshold for impeachment.
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“The president’s serious misconduct, including bribery, soliciting a personal favor from a foreign leader in exchange for his exercise of power, and obstructing justice and Congress, are worse than the misconduct of any prior president, including what previous presidents who faced impeachment have done or been accused of doing,” Michael Gerhardt, a legal scholar, wrote in his opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee.
The legal scholars agreed that if Congress did not impeach Trump, the impeachment process itself would lose all meaning. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine for political gain was an impeachable act – an abuse of power.
“This is precisely misconduct that the framers created a Constitution, including impeachment, to protect against. If Congress concludes they are going to give a pass to the president here, every other president will say, ‘Ok, then I can do the same thing.’ And the boundaries will just evaporate, and those boundaries are set up by the Constitution. And we may be, unfortunately, witnessing their erosion. And that is a danger to all of us,” Gerhardt stated.
The House of Representatives’ new proceedings phase, involving the House Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday, featured several law professors who specialize in constitutional law and the impeachment process. It was the first day of hearings followed by last month’s House Intelligence testimonies.
