Bad Legal Arguments Against Impeachment Are Piling Up
The founders made impeachment political, whether Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz likes it or not.
Alan Dershowitz, enemy of impeachment.
Photographer: John Lamparski/Getty Images
Once again, Alan Dershowitz, the former Harvard Law School professor, is mounting a defense of President Donald Trump against the threat of impeachment.
In the past, Dershowitz has been willing to get creative in his legal arguments. After Trump said that he would appeal any impeachment attempt to the Supreme Court, Dershowitz claimed that it was “certainly possible” that the court would stop the Senate from holding a trial. Former Justice David Souter had, he explained, once written an opinion saying the court might have to step in. What Dershowitz skipped over is that even in this solo concurrence, Souter was talking about such hypotheticals as a Senate conviction based on a coin toss.