Dershowitz: Supreme Court Could Overturn a Trump Impeachment

By Bushrod Washington
July 10, 2018 at 12:05pm

If the Democrats manage to win back the House and Senate (which is looking more and more unlikely) and manage to successfully impeach President Donald Trump and remove him from office, theres a good chance the Supreme Court would intervene and overturn the vote.

In his new book, The Case Against Impeaching Trump, the liberal firebrand attorney said that even if evidence of collusion with the Russian government came to light that actually implicated Trump, it still would not be a criminal offense.

Its not a crime to collude with a foreign government. Maybe it should be, but its not, Dershowitz told the Washington Examiner prior to his Tuesday book release.

Dershowitz said that though such collusion would be a political sin, it does not entirely meet the Constitutions specification of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors needed for impeachment.

The liberal lawyer and Harvard law professor writes in his book that such a development could prompt judicial review, because this president (and perhaps others) might well refuse to leave office if Congress voted to impeach and remove him based on offenses that were not among those enumerated in the Constitution.

A Supreme Court that inserted itself into the Bush v. Gore election in order to avoid a constitutional crisis might well decide to review a House decision to impeach and a Senate decision to remove a president who is not accused and convicted of a specified constitutional crime, Dershowitz continues.

But Dershowitz, says the chief justice of the Supreme Court could rule on a motion to dismiss such charges.

The decision by the framers to have the chief justice preside over the trial of a president may suggest that the decision was not intended to be entirely political.

Indeed, it would be wrong for the chief justice to participate, much less preside over, an entirely political process. Judges are required to stay out of politics, Dershowitz writes.

In the introduction, Dershowitz, who says he is only defending Trump based on legal arguments, further expands on extreme hypotheticals, such as if Trump colluded to let Russia retake Alaska, in efforts to demonstrate his perception of what the Constitutions requirement is for something criminal.

Assume [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decides to retake Alaska, the way he retook Crimea. Assume further that a president allows him to do it, because he believed that Russia has a legitimate claim to its original territory, Dershowitz writes.

That would be terrible, but would it be impeachable? Not under the text of the Constitution.

Dershowitz writes that impeaching Trump would be possible, though, if he did it because he was paid or extorted.

Dershowitz, who has often made legal arguments defending the president in the media, argues the special counsel investigation should have never began in the first place because no specific crime could be defined.

He also said the president gives him mixed reviews, adding that one of his most recent calls from Trump was to correct something I said on television, according to the report.

Dont you love how the left is screaming about the so-called extreme picks by Trump for SCOTUS? Well, weve got extreme for you and it isnt anyone on the right.

The lefty Supreme Court women have voiced their disregard for the bedrock of our nationthe constitution. Theyve also claimed that the electoral college is bunk and that illegal aliens are to be considered just like us. Yep, these are the women of the highest court in the landscary, huh?

We have been covering these activist judges for some time and cannot believe that the Republicans have let this golden moment slip. They could be pulling the video clips below and using them to slam the very extreme views of these Supreme Court Justices! This is why its so important to bring the court back to being apolitical

Andrew McCarthy of The National Review said it best:

It is simply accepted that these justices are not there to judge. They are there to vote. They get to the desired outcome the same way disparate-impact voodoo always manages to get to discrimination: Start at the end and work backwards. Guiding precedents are for the quaint business of administering justice. In the social justice business, the road never before traveled will do if one less traveled is unavailable.

But theres a problem. Once it has become a given that a critical mass of the Supreme Court is no longer expected, much less obliged, to do law, then the Court is no longer a legal institution. It is a political institution

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an Egyptian TV station in 2012 that she would not recommend using the U.S. Constitution as a model for writing a modern-day constitution

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an Egyptian TV station in 2012 that she would not recommend using the U.S. Constitution as a model for writing a modern-day constitution.

 

im hoping this is going viral!

Iran and U.S. ally Saudi Arabia are locked in a battle for regional supremacy, fighting proxy wars in several different Middle Eastern countries. Among the conflicts listed in this map, the International Crisis Group has identified Yemen and Syria as being the most likely to produce violence between the U.S., Iran or their allies. Reuters

The war in Yemen has already caused what the United Nations has called "the world's worst humanitarian crisis." The conflict began shortly after a Zaidi Shiite Muslim rebel group known as the Houthis, or Ansar Allah, managed to force Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi out of the capital city of Sanaa in 2015.

Hadi had replaced longtime Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh after mass protests surrounding the Arab Spring movement in 2012, but the new administration was plagued by accusations of corruption, economic woes and violent insurgencies waged by both the Houthis and the ultraconservative Sunni Muslim Al-Qaeda. Neighboring Saudi Arabia views the Houthis as a proxy force of Iran, which sponsors Shiite Muslim militias across the Middle East, and gathered allies to stage a massive intervention against the Houthi government.

Latest: Iran Says Saudi Arabia Will 'Suffer More' Over Yemen War as U.S. Sends Kushner to Kingdom

Tehran and the Houthis, though largely aligned politically, deny any military connection, but the U.S. and Israel have joined Saudi Arabia in accusing Iran of supplying the Yemeni rebels with the ballistic missiles they frequently fire on Saudi-backed forces and on the kingdom itself.

Saudi Arabia's devastating air campaign has largely failed to break a bloody stalemate between the pro-Yemeni government forces and the Houthi bloc. This could change, however, as the Saudi-led coalition claimed to have seized the only Houthi-held port city of Al-Hodeidah. Iran and the Houthis have denied these reports and casualties continue to mount.

The International Crisis Group warned such a critical battle could lead to drastic measures on either side. It listed "Critical" flashpoints in the Yemeni cities of Saada, where the Saudi-led coalition claimed to have captured and killed members of the powerful Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement, and in the strait of Bab el-Mandeb, where Houthi commanders have threatened to bomb Saudi vessels and military sites.

A map shows deaths in Yemen from June 10-16, 2018 as battles rage on between the Iran-aligned Houthi rebel movement and the Saudi-led coalition attempting to reinstate Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project/Reuters

The non-governmental organization also listed Syra's southern region of Al-Tanf, located near the country's borders with Jordan and Iraq, and the eastern Euphrates River Valley as a "Moderate" threat. The U.S.-led coalition set up a base in Al-Tanf despite Syrian, Russian and Iranian calls to dismantle it and has used force to defend a roughly 34-mile right around it against what it says are incursions from pro-Syrian government fighters.

Syria's long-running civil war also began with the 2011 Arab Spring protests. The U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others backed regime change efforts against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia and Iran, both of which ultimately intervened to support the Syrian leader against rebels and jihadis attempting to overthrow him.

Even as the U.S. cut support for an increasingly Islamist opposition, close calls between international forces in Syria have been dangerously commonplace. The U.S.-led coalition and Russia maintain a deconfliction line to prevent incidents between their dueling air campaigns against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). The Pentagon, however, has intentionally targeted the Syrian government on at least two occasions in response to alleged chemical weapons attacks in rebel-held regions, and it has launched several airstrikes on pro-Syrian government fightersincluding Russian fightersafter reportedly coming under attack.

Related: What Happened to ISIS? U.S. and Syria Near Total Victory Over Jihadis, But May Turn On Each Other Next

The U.S. focused on assisting the local, Kurd-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces take out ISIS in eastern Syria, fellow NATO Western military alliance member Turkey staged a unilateral invasion of northwestern Syria to oust U.S.-backed Kurdish groups branded terrorist organizations by Ankara. Scores of Kurdish fighters fled U.S.-led coalition frontlines to battle the Turkish troops and Syrian rebels, even joining pro-Syrian government efforts.  The U.S. and Russia remained mostly sidelined, but Washington refused Ankara's demands to withdraw from the city of Manbij and the two nations ultimately settled on establishing separate, yet coordinated controls around the Kurd-held city.

The U.S.-led coalition, the Russia-Syria alliance and their mutual Iraqi ally were not the only ones conducting airstrikes in Syria, however. While rarely announced, Israel has increasingly targeted suspected Iranian and pro-Iran military assets in neighboring Syria, from which a hostile forcepotentially Iranianfired rockets toward the Israel-occupied Golan Heights, prompting a massive Israeli air assault.

The U.S. has already warned it would not provide military support to Syrian rebels and a potential arrangement may exclude Iran-aligned elements from taking part in Assad's latest offensive, but a suspected Israeli attack on what was reportedly an Iranian weapons shipment in Damascus has prompted further concerns that the situation could quickly get out of hand. The International Crisis Group listed "Golan Heights and South/West Syria" as a "Critical" flashpoint.

Smoke rises above the southwestern Syrian city of Daraa as it's being bombarded in this footage obtained from the official Syria TV network, June 26, 2018. The Syrian military and its allies have begun a new offensive to retake the rebel-held southwest, but involvement by Iran could risk an intervention from Israel, which occupies the nearby Golan Heights. Syria TV/Reuters TV

On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition told Newsweek that its advisers and allied Syrian rebels came under from "an unidentified hostile" force near Al-Tanf. The incident occurred only days after the U.S. and Israel were blamed for deadly airstrikes against pro-Syrian government fightersincluding Iraqi militiasin the eastern province of Deir Ezzor. The province is located in the Euphrates River Valley, where both the U.S.-led coalition, pro-Syrian government forces and the Iraqi military are clearing out the last of ISIS.

In addition to Yemen and Syria, the International Crisis Group listed other flashpoints in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuza crucial waterway where U.S. and Iranian naval ships have shared tense encounters.