I suppose it’s encouraging that we hear so much about the 25th Amendment these days:
Many scholars believe that the most plausible bases for a Trump impeachment are corruption and abuse of power. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in constitutional studies, argues that, even without evidence of an indictable crime, the Administration’s pattern of seemingly trivial uses of public office for private gain “can add up to an impeachable offense.” Last week, after the State Department took down an official Web page that showcased Trump’s private, for-profit club, Mar-a-Lago, Feldman told me, “A systematic pattern shown through data points would count as grounds for impeachment.” He said that economic analysis of the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s self-enrichment proves the concept. “Berlusconi is said to have gained at most one per cent per business transaction from his Presidency, but that added up to more than a billion euros,” Feldman said.
Allan J. Lichtman is an American University historian who has correctly forecast every Presidential election since 1984 (including Trump’s victory). In April, he published “The Case for Impeachment,” in which he predicted that Trump will not serve a full term, because of a “Nixonian” pattern of trespassing beyond constitutional boundaries. He cited an incident in late January, during the legal battle over Trump’s first executive order on immigration. James L. Robart, the U.S. district judge who blocked the order, rejected the White House’s claim that the court could not review the President’s decision, ruling that the executive must “comport with our country’s laws, and more importantly, our Constitution.” Trump’s response was a further violation of democratic norms: he disparaged Robart as a “so-called judge” and said that he should be held responsible for future terrorist acts on Americans. “If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!” Trump tweeted.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, believes that the Administration’s actions denigrating or denying the power of equal branches of government portend a “constitutional crisis” akin to Nixon’s refusal to accept the appellate-court judgment regarding the White House tapes. Last week, lawmakers from both parties announced that White House officials had refused a request from an oversight committee to turn over internal documents related to the hiring and resignation of Michael Flynn. In a letter to the House oversight committee, Marc T. Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, said that the Administration is withholding documents because they “are likely to contain classified, sensitive and/or confidential information.” Blumenthal told me, “I foresee a point that there will be subpoenas or some kind of compulsory disclosure issued against the President or the Administration by one of the investigative bodies—the F.B.I. or the Intelligence Committee or an independent commission, if there is one—and, at that point, there may be the sort of confrontation that we haven’t really seen in the same way since United States versus Nixon.”
Trump campaigned as a dealmaker who could woo disparate Republicans. Though there was no natural Trumpist wing of the Party, he was expected to ally with the three dozen conservative members of the Freedom Caucus, who tended to admire his anti-establishment populism. But the relationship descended into acrimony almost immediately. After the caucus objected to part of Trump’s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, leading to the collapse of the bill, Trump publicly threatened to target its members in next year’s elections. “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast,” he tweeted. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”
