Earlier this month, in the lead-up to House Democrats’ (kind of/sort of) formal impeachment of President Donald Trump, the Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)-led House Judiciary Committee convened a panel of three law professors: Pamela Karlan of Stanford, Noah Feldman of Harvard, and Jonathan Turley of George Washington. The ostensible reason for Nadler’s summoning of this troika was to air a public discussion of what the U.S. Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” impeachment criterion actually means — a rather curious use of time and taxpayer resources, alas, considering that Alexander Hamilton told us precisely what it meant in The Federalist No. 65.
This triumvirate of ivory tower overlords, moreover, was hardly politically or ideologically diverse. Karlan is an unreconstructed leftist so radical that former President Barack Obama did not even consider her for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination. Feldman is a traditional liberal — hardly one to find compelling the notion that a legal text ought to only be interpreted according to its original public meaning. Turley, the Republican-called witness who was most favorable toward Trump’s impeachment defense narrative, is nonetheless best described as a left-leaning civil libertarian. He is hardly a partisan Trump supporter.
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