" If the 3 years of bugging Trump Tower and wiretapping phones, texts, emails etc produced some evidence of high crimes, I'd support impeaching the President. Since it didn't, that's over."
Since it did, it's not over.
Amash Note on Impeachment
On May 18, in the first of three long Twitter threads, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) announced his conclusion that “President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.” That tweetstorm unleashed a… different kind of storm from his fellow Republicans. The self-styled House Freedom Caucus voted unanimously to condemn Amash, an irate Michigan state rep. announced he’d challenge the congressman in the GOP primary, and, of course, there was President Trump, fumingthat Amash is “a total lightweight” and “a loser who sadly plays right into our opponents hands!”
About the only GOP officeholder with anything nice to say was Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Romney made sure to emphasize his disagreement with Amash, but praised him for “a courageous statement.” Coming from the on-again, off-again Trump critic, “courageous” sounded a bit like a tell (subtext: “I wish I had the guts!”).
Whatever one thinks of President Trump or the other personalities involved, the scope of high crimes and misdemeanors is a constitutional question, and shouldn’t be analyzed through a Red or Blue lens. As I argue in my recent Cato study on impeachment, Indispensible Remedy, if you raise the bar to save a president you like—or lower it to nail one you hate—you may come to regret it when power changes hands.
Amash, who’s long used social media to explain the constitutional reasoning behind the positions he takes, makes a number of claims about the scope of Article II, section 4. As it happens, he has a better grasp of the constitutional issues surrounding impeachment than most of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I’ll highlight and elaborate on a few of his key points below...
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