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Once more, for those who are still confused.

"High crimes and misdemeanors" means official misconduct that is so severe as to subvert the governmental administration of the national interest.
USUALLY a "high crime" will also be one or more specific federal crimes in the United States Code, simply because most misconduct bad enough to rise to that level would also have a law against it.

But it does not have to be.
"High crimes" that aren't necessarily a federal crime in the U.S. Code:

-Secretly letting a foreign dictator annex the U.S.

-Only releasing federal funds to states that vote for you.

-Declaring "The Purge" and firing U.S. attorneys who indict anyone for crimes on that night.
Just because Democrats didn't name a specific federal statute in the articles against Trump doesn't make it a settled issue that Trump didn't commit federal crimes in his Ukraine scheme. He may well have.

But that isn't relevant to whether it is an impeachable offense.
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Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
Moving day!

My cross country road trip begins.
Pulled over at a rest stop in Junction, TX for gas and a quick break. Deciding where we're going to go next on the way to Albuquerque.
That little guy next to me, by the way, is Fawful. You know, the guy I'm a fan of. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawful

He was an early Valentine's Day gift from my wife. And my road trip buddy all the way to Reno.
Read 7 tweets
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Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
This is what I would say if I was Hunter Biden and the GOP forced me to testify in the Senate.

"Look, if you really care about what Burisma was doing and what I was doing working for them, I'm happy to talk about it. But you aren't. You've already admitted this whole thing..."
"...was a cynical play to embarrass my father as he runs for president. And you know he did nothing wrong, you were all lifelong friends with him. And you should be ashamed of everything you've done to our family and to international diplomacy over petty politics. I may not..."
"...be perfect. I may have skated on my father's name. But this president put lives in danger in Ukraine. This president undermined America's faith in the electoral system. And that is what matters at the end of the day. Take responsibility for it."
Read 3 tweets
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Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
This map would shatter a ton of conventional wisdom.

Dems would need a huge nationwide collapse with college-educated white suburbanites to lose Minnesota, and those are assumed to be the same voters we would need to win to flip any of the red Sun Belt states.
Basically, this map would imply the 2018 coalition that won us the House imploded, and suburban white voters came home to the GOP, but that at the same time, there was a huge, huge explosion of minority turnout. Something way bigger than voter rolls even predicted was possible.
As for what the hypothetical Democratic ticket that accomplished this was, I'm going to guess it was Biden/Abrams, except Biden moved sharply to the left in the primary and general because he was spooked by Sanders.
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Related threads

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Paul Rosenberg
@PaulHRosenberg
ICYMI: For 30+ years GOP's originalism claimed unique fidelity to Framers, cast Dems as lawless relativists. Now their defense v Trump impeachment turns all those claims into a dumpster fire. @espinsegall—author of *Originalism as Faith*—helps explain 1/10
salon.com/2020/01/25/so-…
Impeachment/Originalism Dumpster Fire!
Key false claims defending Trump:
* Impeachment requires a crime
* Impeachment overturns an election
* Abuse of power not impeachable
* Executive privilege trumps congressional oversight
ALL contradict GOP's beloved "orginalism" too!
2/10
Here's the problem in a nutshell, from @espinsegall: 3/10
Read 10 tweets
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Will Chamberlain 🇺🇸
@willchamberlain
The most powerful argument against impeaching the President is the simple, textualist one: that "high crimes and misdemeanors" means what it says.

Crimes and Misdemeanors are violations of *established law*.

"High" refers to them being serious crimes against the state.
That's at the core of Pat Cipollone and the Trump team's argument.

Very, very simple.

You can't impeach someone for something that isn't a "crime."

Which means you can't make it up on the fly.
I've heard a few arguments from the Democrats about why this simple, plain reading of the Constitutional text shouldn't apply.

First, they rely on Alexander Hamilton's Federalist 65 to argue that they only need prove an "abuse of power."

Nonsense.
Read 8 tweets
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Leslie McAdoo Gordon
@McAdooGordon
Some of the positions (not all I grant you) are consonant with intellectual honesty:

1. ALL politicians use their official position to advantage themselves & disadvantage opponents. We clearly don’t believe as a body politic that that behavior is per se wrong.

/1
2. So the question is what degree of this behavior becomes an abuse of power problematic enough that we deem it to be the type of “high crime & misdemeanor” that warrants impeachment & potential removal of a President. /2
3. Looking at the specific charges: none are alleged as “treason” or “bribery,” nor do the facts alleged fit either of those offenses, which leaves only “high crimes & misdemeanors” as options for grounds for impeachment under the Constitution. /3
Read 31 tweets
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cynthia kouril
@cynthiakouril
Thread.
For all of you out there wondering what "High Crimes & Misdemeanors" means and whether or not there has to be an 'underlying crime' let me help you out here.

Last week I moderated a CLE on Impeachment and you are welcome to the fruits of my labors on that topic.
A basic rule of legal interpretation is that you cannot define a legal term using information not yet in existence at the time the term was used. At the time the Constitution was debated and adopted, there was no federal criminal code, much less the US Code we have today.
So, you cannot use anything in the current Code to define "High Crime & Misdemeanor".

You have to use that term, and it is a legal 'term of art', as the phrase was understood when it was inserted into the Constitution.
Read 16 tweets
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Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
THIS is what the Republicans wanted to avoid:

a Harvard Law Professor testifying about the fact that "the President has committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors for his personal benefit."

And there you have it.

PS. He clerked for Souter, who is no radical lefty.
This is BRILLIANT. Feldman is testifying as to the history of the Constitutional Convention, and the debate over the removal of the impeachment clause because re-election would take care of removal.
It remained, because Madison and Mason, among other Republicans, insisted on it.

And now it undercuts the @GOP's argument that the election should take the place of impeachment
Read 5 tweets
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Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
(THREAD) If—as reported by CNN, NBC, NYT, and WP—we're days or weeks from Mueller delivering a report on Trump-Russia collusion to DOJ, America needs a crash course in some basic concepts to understand what's happening. I try to offer that here. I hope you'll read on and retweet.
1. PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE. The "presumption of innocence" is what's called in the justice system a "trial presumption," meaning it has force and effect exclusively in a setting in which a "finder of fact" (usually a jury) is deliberating after evidence has been presented to it.
2. Americans wrongly believe the "presumption of innocence" a general principle all Americans must adopt; it manifestly is not and isn't meant to be. What it means is a courtroom finder of fact—usually a jury—must presume innocence unless and until a burden of proof has been met.
Read 76 tweets

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