1. I want to share one strongly argued case for impeachment, from a leading constitutional scholar, that I stumbled across the other day.
2 "[The president’s] defenders describe the unthinkable disaster of impeachment. But it should not be unthinkable. The framers of the Constitution did not see impeachment as a doomsday scenario; they thought it necessary to remove bad men from the offices they were subverting."
3. “The president’s defenders, experts at changing the subject, prefer to debate whether [he] committed a felony …. [but] ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ are not limited to actions that are crimes under federal law."
4. “It becomes clear that the White House has never before been occupied by such a reckless and narcissistic adventurer. Sociopath is not too strong a word."
5. “We are regularly lectured about a constitutional crisis if the House goes forward with hearings and ultimately votes a bill of impeachment for trial in the Senate. Consider the alternative. Perhaps American presidents, by and large, have not been a distinguished lot…"
6. “….But if we ratify [his] behavior in office, we may expect not just lack lack of distinction in the future but aggressively dishonest, even criminal, conduct. The real calamity will not be that we removed a president from office but that we did not."
7. The fire-breathing radical in question? Former U.S. Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, in a glowing review of Ann Coulter’s “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” published in The Wall Street Journal in 1998.
