Laurence Tribe/Dahlia Lithwick: How Many Times Could Donald Trump Be Impeached?

[babylonsister]

How Many Times Could Donald Trump Be Impeached?
Laurence Tribe explains why Congress should aim to work at three speeds.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Oct 16, 2019
4:18 PM

On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard, about some of the legal questions the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s behavior has brought up. A portion of that conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

snip//

Laurence Tribe: Well, a lot of people, I think, would have a lovely time imagining those perp walks, but I think that’s not a realistic option. It’s legal. It’s a power that Congress has. It theoretically has the power. The Supreme Court has, without dissent, affirmed it—the power to actually conduct a little trial of people who refuse to comply with subpoenas and orders to show up and produce documents. And if they don’t go along, they can be locked in the basement of the Capitol or they can be subjected to escalating fines.

But I think that would be a terrible distraction. Imagine in the modern world how that would look. It would really make the banana republic that the president has created look like sort of a banana soup republic. It’s just not a good idea. Not that we can’t do it—and maybe hanging it over the White House as a kind of sword of Damocles is rhetorically a good idea—but it’s not something I favor.

I think it would be a distraction. I think one has to go to court, one has to expedite proceedings in court. And if courts move too slowly, just with what they sometimes call all deliberate speed, then don’t wait. As I’ve argued in various forums, there’s no reason why impeachment can’t proceed right now on the basis of what we know while we continue to investigate. It would be justifiable for the House of Representatives to impeach the president for various abuses of power, particularly with respect to the way he withheld military assistance from a vulnerable Ukraine in order to benefit his own reelection campaign by getting manufactured dirt on Joe Biden and in order to achieve other things. That’s an abuse of power. He could be impeached for that tomorrow.

He could also be impeached for this kind of stonewalling, the “I spit on your Congress,” tomorrow. There’s no reason why these impeachments can’t proceed while Congress still digs around and tries to get to the bottom of certain details, which we needn’t know in order to say that he has abused his power in an impeachable way, but which the nation has a right to know. The way in which there is a kind of private State Department run by Giuliani and some thugs who were recently arrested and how this all has gone on under our noses for the last several months—all of that needs to be unearthed.

But he can be impeached in the meantime. And there’s no rule that says you can only impeach a president once. The stone wall that he had relied on in the Senate is beginning to crack. It’s not at all clear that the Senate will back him up. A lot of senators are so dismayed by the way he is throwing our allies, the Kurds, under the bus and virtually inviting ethnic cleansing. A lot of those people are beginning, I think, to reconsider whether they want to go down with this particular version of the Titanic.

So I actually said the same thing this past week, I think, in print: Don’t turn this into two years of waiting for [special counsel Robert] Mueller. If Donald Trump confessed to Lester Holt that he fired Jim Comey to get rid of the Russia probe, we don’t need two more years of evidence. And essentially we’ve got, as I understand it, the three articles of impeachment against Nixon: abuse of power, obstruction, ignoring subpoenas. We’ve got that in our hands, and trying to run after emoluments, which we’ve been doing for three years with very middling success, is not the way to go. I think the people who resist the analysis you and I just put forward tend to say, “You’re leaving too much on the table. You cannot leave on the table all the other bad conduct.”
“There’s no reason why these impeachments can’t proceed while Congress still digs around and tries to get to the bottom of certain details.” — Laurence Tribe

But I don’t want to leave it on the table. As I’m saying, impeach the guy and keep pursuing him for all of these other things. I don’t think that having voted an article of impeachment, you then fold up your briefcase and walk away. He should not be allowed to get away with any of these horrible things he’s done. But that doesn’t mean that because he’s done so many abusive things, he can basically tie us up in knots and stay in power and take extremely dangerous steps that undermine our national security and erode our alliances, just because he’s done so much that’s wrong that we can never quite catch up. It’s like saying not just “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.” It’s that every time you go after me for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, I’ll shoot somebody else and you’ll never catch up.

more...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/impeach-trump-multiple-times-laurence-tribe.html

[unblock]

1. Exactly! If your s.o. has cheated a dozen times, dump them already! Don't wait for a complete count!

[empedocles]

2. There are numerous ways the Speaker can play this, just as an example, a draft

circulation of an impeachment item could be circulated, [and probably leaked], for comment. Satisfying some do something now types perhaps.

Anyway, it seems that the Speaker's long game of letting the process and events [like Ukraine], play out, is working very well.

[BigmanPigman]

3. Good! I have asked if he could be impeached more than once on DU

over the past few weeks but no one knew the definite answer. Earlier this week I heard that YES, he could be from a different professional (not Tribe) on MSNBC. He will get nailed one way or another.