Calling out the Democratic Party for its far-left extremism, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz denounced House Speaker Pelosi’s plan to withhold sending the impeachment vote to the Senate for a trial as “unconstitutional.”
As noted by Fox News, the Harvard Law professor’s recent op-ed for Newsmax came in response to his colleague Laurence Tribe, who backed Pelosi in not allowing a Senate trial on impeachment.
“[Tribe] would withhold the trial until the Senate agreed to change its rules, or presumably until a new election put many more Democrats in the Senate. Under his proposal, there might never be a Senate trial, but the impeachment would stand as a final and permanent condemnation of President Trump,” Dershowitz wrote.
“It is difficult to imagine anything more unconstitutional, more violative of the intention of the Framers, more of a denial of basic due process and civil liberties, more unfair to the president and more likely to increase the current divisiveness among the American people,” he further argued. “Put bluntly, it is hard to imagine a worse idea put forward by good people”
Pelosi has not expressly stated if she would accept the Senate trial, though she did issue a statement demanding that Senate Republicans stop coordinating with the White House.
“Let me tell you what I don’t consider a fair trial,” Pelosi told reporters on Wednesday. “This is what I don’t consider a fair trial — that Leader McConnell has stated that he’s not an impartial juror, that he’s going to take his cues, in quotes, from the White House, and he is working in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office.”
Tribe echoed Pelosi’s call on Thursday when he said that the Senate’s demand for the House to pass along articles of impeachment violates the constitution.
“Senate rules requiring the House to ‘immediately’ present its articles of impeachment to the Senate clearly violate the constitutional clause in Article I giving each house the sole power to make its own rules,” Tribe tweeted on Wednesday. “It’s up to the House when and how to prosecute its case in the Senate.”
In response to this, Dershowitz said that Pelosi and the Democrats would be violating the president’s constitutional right to a fair trial.
“An impeached president has a right to be tried and acquitted by the Senate,” he wrote. “Denying him and the American people that fundamental right might serve the temporary interests of the Democratic party, and academics who support it, but would do violence to the rule of Constitutional law that is supposed to serve all Americans, regardless of party or ideology.”
Throughout the entire Mueller investigation, as Democrats were calling for the president’s impeachment over alleged Russian collusion, Dershowitz stood firm in his conviction that every American deserves civil liberties, including and especially Americans with whom he disagrees. Just by merely sticking up for President Trump’s rights as an American, Dershowitz claimed he faced intense scrutiny and ostracization from his liberal friends.
“I am a liberal Democrat in politics … but that is not good enough for some of my old friends on Martha’s Vineyard. For them, it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump. So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard,” he wrote in an op-ed last year.