Law expert Jonathan Turley rips argument that Trump wasn’t impeached

By: Bob F.

A prominent law professor who was called as a Republican witness during the House impeachment proceedings threw cold water Thursday on the notion that President Donald Trump isn’t technically impeached until Speaker Nancy Pelosi sends the passed articles to the Senate.

“Last Saturday in West Palm Beach, Fla., in remarks to a group of young supporters, President Trump road-tested a talking point that appeared to be aimed at changing the narrative around his December impeachment: ‘You had no crime. Even their people said there was no crime,’ he said of congressional Democrats, before adding: ‘In fact, there’s no impeachment. There’s no — their own lawyers said there’s no impeachment,’” Jonathan Turley, who opposed Trump’s impeachment, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

“But while this theory may provide tweet-ready fodder for the president to defend himself and taunt his political adversaries, it’s difficult to sustain on the text or history or logic of the Constitution,” wrote Turley, who teaches at George Washington University law school in DC.

Turley was responding to a witness for Democrats, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who wrote in Bloomberg last week that the impeachment might not be legit because of Pelosi’s move.

“If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president. If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say he wasn’t truly impeached at all,” Feldman wrote.

But Turley said that while Pelosi and Democrats were likely playing politics, that did not mean Trump had not been impeached in a mostly party-line vote by the house.

“Congressional Democrats’ current posture may be too cute by half, and is perhaps politically ill-advised, but any argument that they’ve entered a legal limbo by stalling the delivery of articles to the Senate falls flat,” he said, adding that the Constitution requires both a House vote and a Senate trial to try to prevent an overtly political outcome.

“The Framers set a two-thirds requirement for conviction, because it knew that some impeachments might be pure political exercises,” he wrote.

“The House calls out presidential transgressions that meet the standard of ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ That is not an ultimate finding of guilt, and alone can’t effect a president’s removal. But make no mistake, the House speaks in its own voice and in its own time. It did so on Dec. 18, 2019.”

Pelosi, who pushed to get the impeachment done before Christmas, said a week ago that she was in no rush to send the articles to the Senate because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had not revealed how a trial would be conducted.

McConnell has said he was working hand-in-glove with the White House while devising strategy for a Senate trial, rejecting Sen. Chuck Schumer’s call for top administration officials to testify.