Ross: Constitution gets murky as impeachment nears end
Jan 31, 2020, 9:12 AM | Updated: 10:27 am
Impeachment proceedings near an end in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
(Getty Images)
Senators asked 180 questions in the impeachment hearing, and the main thing I learned as I listened to the same points being made over and over and over, was that the Constitution might as well be an ink blot.
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I saw very smart people with law degrees and with a lifetime of judicial experience, people who have studied the Constitution, all unable to agree on what it says.
It wasn’t even close!
One highly-trained lawyer claimed that if it’s for the good of the country, a president can seek help from another nation to investigate an American who happens to be a political opponent, as long as he believes his motives are pure.
Whereas another highly-trained lawyer said that would turn America into a monarchy, the very thing the Constitution was written to prevent.
“That is the normalization of lawlessness,” said Schiff.
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There was no consensus on what offenses are impeachable, how to define an abuse of power, or on how far executive privilege goes.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised; there are very smart people who can’t even agree on how to define a legal catch in football .
But it does raise an important question: Given that all of these people took a sacred oath to uphold the Constitution, what does it mean to swear to uphold the Constitution if everybody is swearing to uphold their own version of it?
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