Noah Feldman, Columnist

Impeachment Legalism Is a Trap Democrats Must Avoid

Focus on the Constitution, not extortion and bribery statutes.

November 11, 2019 at 2:25 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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House Democrats will shift this week from closed-door evidence-gathering to public impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump. The single most dangerous pitfall they face is allowing too much legal talk to obfuscate the fundamental wrongness of Trump’s conduct: using the might of his office to pressure a foreign country to destroy the candidate he thought most likely to threaten his re-election.

To be clear, it’s not that the law is irrelevant to impeachment. To the contrary. The Constitution says that impeachment is appropriate for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The framers chose that broad language so that it would cover any conceivable abuse of power.