Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
A crime is not a requirement of impeachment.
Impeachment is a vote in the House and anything is impeachable.
If you're trying to school me on what it takes to impeach, you needn't bother. I have stated at least two times on this forum that the House could impeach for any reason it wants if it has the votes.
Look at the reasons proposed for impeaching the last President.
Job offer to Pennsylvania Representative Joe Sestak
Preventing Obama from "pushing his agenda"
Obama administration immigration policy
Libya intervention
Benghazi attack
Impeachment requested by a townhall meeting audience member
False claims of being born outside the United States
IRS targeting conservatives
Debt ceiling crisis
Hearing on "President's Constitutional Duty"
Prisoner swap
Transgender bathroom directive
Here we go again. What you do best. Change the subject. Pile on with stuff that has nothing to do with the transcript. As if spouting out a whole lot of words is enough to make it sound that you have a valid point.
The Transcript shows bribery as defined by the Founders.
Perhaps the stenographers very professional exact words that Trump claims exist will show more or was he hyperbolizing once again.
I don't recall how the Founders defined bribery. Perhaps you could refresh. I don't see bribery in the transcript. As for withholding funds, it seems that the Ukraine Pres. didn't know about that till after the phone call. And it has been explained and corroborated, that the temporary fund withholding was to gain leverage in getting the Europeans to pony up more aid for Ukraine than they were giving. As for the Bidens, when Trump asked for help, he directly referred to Ukraine's possible interference in the election. Trump didn't say anything about the Bidens until after the Ukraine President brought it up.
In fact, Trump’s conduct almost certainly satisfies the modern statutory standard for bribery. As Randall Eliason has explained, a quid pro quo “need not be stated in express terms; corrupt actors are seldom so clumsy, and the law may not be evaded through winks and nods.” We have little doubt that a prosecutor would be able to establish a quid pro quo based on what was said on the call and the surrounding facts and context. (As an aside, Trump’s conduct also likely qualifies as extortion. As James Lindgren has explained at length, historically there has been a substantial overlap between the concepts of extortion and bribery, and around the time of the Founding, the terms were often used to describe the same conduct.)
But even if Trump’s actions do not satisfy the modern criminal standard for bribery, the argument from Trump’s defenders is misplaced—because the federal statute isn’t the relevant statement of the law in the context of impeachment.
The Founders had no intent of tying the constitutional definition of bribery to federal criminal statutory law. On the most basic level, no federal criminal code existed at the time that the Constitution was drafted. Beyond that, the Framers had no reason to believe that Congress would enact federal criminal statutes in the future. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their comprehensive book on impeachment, “To End a Presidency,” criminal law was understood to be the province of the states, and there was very little federal criminal law at all until the mid-20th century. To the extent there was federal criminal law, it followed the common law model. That is why the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors can’t be limited by federal statutes. The same goes for bribery—as there was no general federal bribery statute at all until 1853.
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OK, so what you're saying is that there is no federal statutory reason here for the impeachment by this federal House of Representatives (there is no evidence of bribery in the transcript). And we both agree that Congress can cook up any grounds it wants to impeach if it has the votes.
This post by you was in response to my saying yes, do focus on the transcript. As usual, you wander on to other possibilities and conjectures. And, in the end, you seem to settle on this impeachment attempt being for whatever the House wants it to be about. The transcript, which I said to focus on (which I thought you wanted to do in your post that I responded to), in substantive fact, has no statutory or criminal reasons for impeachment. It's simply about the House wanting to impeach.
In substantive fact, actually, the transcript does contain a legitimate request, per the treaty with Ukraine, to assist on a matter pertaining to an ongoing DOJ investigation. That is something you, to this point, have avoided talking about. Why?