Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Abuse of Power Is a Dangerous Standard for Democrats to Play With
Almost the minute after the White House released its 110-page brief for the Senate impeachment trial, careful observers noticed a contradiction between the White House counsel’s view and Attorney General William Barr’s. The White House brief argues that there can be no impeachable “abuse of power” without a violation of established...
An Impeachment Trial Without Witnesses Would Be Unconstitutional
On the opening day of the impeachment trial, the Senate, in a party-line vote of 53–47, approved an organizing resolution establishing the ground rules for the trial and rejecting efforts by Democrats to compel the testimony of witnesses and the production of documents not included by the House in its impeachment inquiry. However, the resolution...
Why Has-Beens Love Trump
Mark Wilson / GettyTrace the careers of Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr, both of whom joined Donald Trump’s impeachment team last week, and you notice a similar arc. As young men, each rapidly ascended to the upper echelons of the legal profession. At age 28, Dershowitz became the youngest tenured professor in the history of Harvard Law...
The Solemn Absurdity of Trump’s Impeachment Trial
The impeachment trial of the century had barely begun when word came down that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had softened his initial plan to make the House managers and President Donald Trump’s lawyers present their cases in marathon 12-hour sessions over four days. He’ll allow each team a more civilized eight hours over six...
Trump’s Myth About Adam Schiff
Never in the field of political conflict has so much been made by so many out of so little.Because the topic here is caricatured speeches, I hasten to add: Winston Churchill didn’t say that. As the Senate’s impeachment trial of Donald Trump begins, one of the more curious, and less enlightening, elements has been the focus by the...
How Trump Busted the Myth of the Unitary Executive
On January 13, 2020, a political scientist named Daniel Drezner tweeted a screenshot of a Washington Post article, along with a cheeky comment: “I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.” The screenshot showed a quotation about handling the president from a former senior...
Trump’s Brand of Transactional Politics
On a debate stage during the 2016 Republican primary, Donald Trump explained why he’d given money to Democratic politicians: “I give to many people,” he said. “Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three...
Senators Know They Don’t Know the Whole Story
This week’s allegations by Lev Parnas—a federally indicted associate of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani—render downright quaint the debate over whether the Senate should call live witnesses in the president’s impending impeachment trial. Of course the American public deserves to hear from witnesses at the trial,...
The Kremlin Inches Closer to the Biden Plot
Somewhere near the heart of the Ukraine scandal is Dmytro Firtash. Evidence has long suggested this fact. But over the past week, in a televised interview and in documents he supplied to congress, Rudy Giuliani’s former business partner Lev Parnas pointed his finger at the Ukranian oligarch. According to Parnas, Giuliani’s team had a...
Shooting the Messenger
The Trump administration has placed civil servants and nonpolitical government employees in a terrible position. Their job is to provide accurate, nonpartisan information and make decisions grounded in law; sometimes that involves providing testimony to Congress, which legally must be truthful. Yet if they tell the truth, President Donald Trump...
