But, still, the “conservatives” out there are repeating them anyways. Let’s have David Priess of Lawfare tell us about it:
Law professor and former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo this week declared, “What the framers thought was that the American people would judge a president at the time of an election. They would never have wanted an impeachment within a year of an election.”
He couldn’t be more wrong. Nothing in the Constitution, the framers’ debates or historical practice suggests presidents get a free pass during the final year of their term that allows them to avoid facing the sole constitutional remedy for treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors. Presidential terms have a constitutional time limit; impeachment inquiries and impeachment votes do not.
Sounds a lot like that idiotic SCOTUS nominee argument over Garland, doesn’t it?
I’d add that Congress is the closest thing we have to a group of experts on the President concurrently in office. Congress is elected to take care of government, including oversight of the President, the Judiciary, and each other. In Revolutionary War times, the government may not have been particularly complex, but it was, for many citizens, far away; the Senators and Representatives were picked to make these hard decisions. These days, we’re still a representative democracy, and now it’s gotten quite complex, and the communications masters have become quite sophisticated at obscuring the truth.
People with names from McConnell to McCollum to Pelosi are, once again, responsible for making the decision of whether or not the President is fit to hold the office or not. And this should be done without the dishonorable partisan posturing we’re seeing from names such as Nunes, Graham, and, yes, McConnell.
Yoo is engaging in a partisan fantasy which, as Priess points out, has no basis in the Constitution or records of the debates.
Yoo is an idiot. His argument doesn’t even deserve to be taken seriously.
