Opinion: Dershowitz may have argued himself out of relevance
In his star turn in the Senate well Monday, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz at first delivered an account of executive power that, while extreme and wrongheaded, seduced a cadre of Senate Republicans.
After Dershowitz’s presentation Monday, a series of Republican senators — including Rand Paul , John Cornyn and Ron Johnson — took to the airwaves to endorse the Dershowitz position that only statutorily defined crimes can amount to impeachable offenses and “abuse of power” is by definition not impeachable.
That is, until Wednesday, when Dershowitz gave a stunning response to a question posed by Sen. Ted Cruz .In a slow, dramatic tone that left no doubt that he meant what he was saying, Dershowitz asserted that when a president “does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”The derision from commentators and the legal community was near instantaneous.
But that position was itself untenable. On the first plank, Dershowitz himself acknowledged that his is a minority view, but that understates the case: Among credible scholars, there is really no serious view that impeachable offenses are limited to crimes, and the proof, which by now is well-worn, is multifarious and definitive.The claim, which White House lawyer Patrick Philbin reiterated, is that the “abuse of power” standard is too amorphous to justify removal.
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