Prof. Laurence Tribe was on AM Joy this morning making his case to the moribund House leadership that it is their duty to commence impeachment hearing against the lying SOB in the White House and if the Senate remains recalcitrant in doing what is right, explain to the public that they are stopping short of referring it for trial and proceeding with censure.
.@tribelaw: No one who has been the subject of serious censure efforts has ever been re-elected to the presidency. #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/Hf8pwljEQO
— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) June 8, 2019
Raw Story has the rest of the video and more text:
“Explain how the House might be able to act if the Senate refused to take up and start an impeachment trial, or would otherwise simply build in an acquittal,” Reid asked him.
“What the House could do, Joy, is fairly straightforward and they have done it before. They could have factual conclusions,” said Tribe. “The way the Judiciary Committee did when it concluded Nixon completed offenses. It wasn’t just like an indictment. An indictment is basically an accusation referring to someone else for trial. But the House of Representatives is quite capable of reaching a verdict. That is what I proposed it should do.”
“Now in the process of the hearings the House might educate the public and finally Mitch McConnell might give in and the whole thing might go in a direction that Nancy Pelosi, I think quite rightly, says is not very likely,” said Tribe. “But who’s afraid of the big bad turtle here? We don’t have to worry about what McConnell is going to do, the Senate will do…
…“My sense is that after a full hearing where the president and his lawyers would be invited to make a presentation, of course they would say no thanks, but they would have a full opportunity,” said Tribe. “And it would be a kind of trial, not exactly a trial, it is only the Senate that has the power to try impeachments. But you don’t have to be afraid of what the Senate would do. If the Senate is in the president’s hip pocket, then you can simply stiff the Senate and say we find that the president created high crimes and misdemeanors, but we’re not going to do you the favor of tossing you what looks like an indictment so you can shred it in the McConnell shredder.”
The House, after all, is an independent body,” Tribe added later on in the segment. “It is the people’s House, and they should stand up to their duty under the Constitution.”
I think Mr. Tribe is exactly right.
Even if the Senate won’t do its duty, the House should.
Please follow me on Twitter @durrati
.@tribelaw: No one who has been the subject of serious censure efforts has ever been re-elected to the presidency. #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/Hf8pwljEQO
Um. I don’t get this. How many presidents have EVER been “the subject of serious censure efforts” in the past? And how many of them were ELIGIBLE to be re-elected? Both recent Presidents who faced a potential “censure effort” were already in their second terms and, hence, constitutionally ineligible to run for re-election (I’m referring, of course, to Nixon and Clinton); as for Andrew Johnson, he’d frustrated members of his own party, even without the impeachment prospect (which was, itself, due more to some legitimate criticisms of Johnson’s violation of the Tenure of Office act and Johnson’s own attacks on the legitimacy of Congressional actions) and he couldn’t even manage better than 2nd place in the first balloting of the 1868 Democratic Convention.
Attempts were made to censure Adams, Buchanan, Taft and Truman, none were re-elected afterwards (yes Truman was eligible to run again in1952, but chose not to.)