Former White House Counsel Bob Bauer on Lawfare gets quite exercised about a couple of lawyers who think the proper use of power insulates President Trump from impeachment:
Josh Blackman, in three successive postings for Lawfare, and co-commentators David Rivkin and Lee Casey in a separate piece for the Wall Street Journal, have been developing the case that a president firing an FBI director or other senior law enforcement official may not subject to impeachment for obstruction of justice. Their approaches are somewhat different: Blackman is working out a more fully developed, nuanced theory of how we should see a conflict between congressional impeachment power and claims of executive authority. But these authors have all offered support for the proposition that, however corrupt or (as Rivkin and Casey put it) “nefarious” a president’s motive may be, his constitutional authority necessarily includes removing from office those officials who presumptively answer to him. Congress, they say, must stand down.
Mr. Bauer’s development of his argument is long, I became bored and confused, and then it occurred to me there’s a much more convincing argument, if not entire respectable and permissible in the realm of the law.
It’s an analogy.
Suppose I have a rifle. I operate it in the prescribed manner – turn off the safety, put the stock to my shoulder, do whatever it is you do with your breath, and squeeze the trigger. I own the rifle legally, and I know how to operate it.
And I hit my target, some innocent civilian minding his own business.
My ownership and operation of the rifle cannot be criticized, I do it all perfectly.
But my target was execrable, impossible.
That’s the analogy. Maybe President Trump has the right to fire some of his people. But if that results in shielding him from investigations which may reveal hanky panky by the yankee, then shit, of course it’s impeachable as obstruction of justice. It’s just stupid to think otherwise. The operation and the character of its results are not atomic; each is separate.
