Donald Trump has long maintained that he has absolute immunity from being prosecuted for any and all crimes he is alleged to have committed while serving as president of the United States. On Tuesday, that dubious proposition was put to the test when three appellate court judges presided over oral arguments in the case of “The United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.” I attended the court hearing in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and watched, with significant satisfaction, as three judges clearly signaled, through their questions of counsel, that nothing in our Constitution, our laws or our democratic system of government places an American president above the law.
All three judges — Karen LeCraft Henderson, J. Michelle Childs, and Florence Pan — were extremely skeptical of the arguments made by Trump lawyer John Sauer. There were so many … unusual claims made by Sauer that it’s hard to know which was the most outlandish. But as I’ve reflected on the totality of his presentation — designed to persuade the court that it’s in our nation’s interest to allow a president to commit crimes with near-absolute immunity — I want to focus on the central contention on which the presidential-immunity argument rises or falls: the meaning of the Impeachment Judgments clause.
Sauer apparently decided he could rewrite that portion of the Constitution, and urged the judges to adopt what he’d like the Constitution to say.
That clause reads as follows:
“Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
In layman’s terms, this means that even if the House of Representatives impeaches a president and the Senate convicts at his impeachment trial, the president can…
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