President Donald Trump has more than a week left in his current term, and the Democratic Party is still preparing to impeach him. Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said Trump’s impeachment is not justified, and Congress has no jurisdiction to hold an impeachment trial against someone who has left public office.
According to Forsyth News, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on a resolution to impeach Trump this Wednesday as Trump supporters flooded the Capitol last Wednesday (6). If the resolution passes, Trump will become the first U.S. president to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives. According to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. House of Representatives must pass a motion of impeachment by a simple majority, and then the Senate will conduct a trial and convict the accused if two-thirds of the senators present find him guilty.
When Trump was impeached last year, Dershowitz defended Trump in his first trial in the Senate. In an interview today, Dershowitz argued that by the time this impeachment enters the trial process, Trump will have left the White House and Congress will have no jurisdiction to conduct an impeachment trial against someone who no longer holds public office, and that the Democrats are now insisting on bringing the impeachment case just to make it impossible for Trump to shake off the impeachment charges.
Dershowitz also mentioned that the Democrats have no intention of bringing the impeachment to trial and Trump would have no chance to appear at trial again to defend himself, which is like a prosecutor indicting someone on some major charge and saying, “I won’t let you have a chance to prove your innocence at trial.”
Dershowitz asserts that in the U.S. Constitution, impeachment refers to a mechanism to force someone out of public office, and once impeached, the person impeached is unable to hold public office in the future, but impeachment is not a mechanism designed to disqualify someone from running for office.
In addition, Dershowitz also argued that Trump’s “call for people to go to Washington” is protected by the First Amendment because it does not have the connotation of inciting violence, so the anti-Trump camp’s argument for impeaching Trump is also untenable.
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