University of North Carolina Law Professor Michael Gerhardt was crystal clear on Wednesday when answering questions from Democratic counsel Norm Eisen, a former White House special counsel and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic during the Obama years.
Gerhardt, unlike his law professor colleague Jonathan Turley, believed that the House Intelligence Committee made a successful case that President Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense. Harvard Law Prof. Noah Feldman and Stanford Law Prof. Pamela Karlan, and Gerhardt, the three witnesses Democrats wanted to testify at the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, unanimously agreed President Trump committed an impeachable offense.
“I of course agree with Professors Feldman and Karlan,” Gerhardt said. “I want to stress that if what we are talking about is not impeachable, nothing is impeachable.”
“This is precisely the misconduct that the Framers created a Constitution including impeachment to protect against. And if there is no action — if Congress concludes they’re going to give a pass to the president here, as Professor Karlan suggested earlier, every other president will say ‘Okay, then I can do the same thing’ and the boundaries just evaporate,” he continued. “Those boundaries are set up by the Constitution, and unfortunately we may be witnessing their erosion.”
“And that is a danger to all of us,” Gerhardt concluded.
[Image via Image via NBC Screengrab]
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