If the House of Representatives votes to impeach President Donald Trump based on the evidence currently on the record against him, it would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says.
“It would be an utter abuse of the power of Congress. The Constitution sets out four criteria for impeaching a president: Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” Dershowitz explained to LevinTV host Mark Levin on Sunday night’s episode of Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox News. “Unless one of those criteria is met, Congress does not have the authority to impeach, and if they do, their impeachment would be void. Alexander Hamilton said any act of Congress that is inconsistent with the Constitution is void.”
The Harvard legal scholar also took issue with the notion that impeachment is whatever Congress says it is, which has become a popular talking point among Trump’s political opponents.
“Congress may be able to get away with it,” Dershowitz added, “but this confuses what Congress can get away with with what Congress is sworn to uphold. Any member of Congress who votes to impeach President Trump without a finding that he is guilty of treason, bribery, other high crimes or misdemeanors is violating their oath of office.”
Dershowitz also compared House Democrats’ search for an impeachable offense to use against the president to the authoritarian behavior of the leaders of the former Soviet Union.
“What they’re trying to do is what the KGB under Lavrentiy Beria said to Stalin, the dictator — I’m not comparing our country to the Soviet Union; I just want to make sure it never becomes anything like that,” Dershowitz said. “Beria said to Stalin, ‘Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.’ And that’s what some of the Democrats are doing. They have Trump in their sights, they want to figure out a way of impeaching him, and they’re searching for a crime.”
Dershowitz went on to warn that Democrats have created “open-ended criteria which bear no relationship to the words of the Constitution itself” and that a potential impeachment of President Trump would set a precedent that will “weaponize impeachment, and the next Democrat who gets elected will be impeached.”
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