Like most of America, including all the Republican members of the Senate, I'm largely ignoring the impeachment trial currently underway. I don't know the odds of Trump actually being removed from office by it but I suspect they're around the same as the odds of me being his replacement.
There was a term that Republicans used incessantly during the Clinton impeachment — "the rule of law." I hope no one uses it this time because it's become pretty much inoperative in politics today, replaced by "the rule of retaining power." As Jonathan Chait said in this piece…
Trump of course opposes all mechanisms of accountability. Anybody who investigates Trump — the Department of Justice, Congress, a state attorney general, a judge presiding over a lawsuit by victims of his swindling — is corrupt, biased, engaging in a witch hunt, and so on.
"The rule of law" is of course meaningless if one does not recognize that laws are to prevail and that is clearly not the case any longer. And "corrupt" no longer means you can point to any law the person you're applying that to has broken. It now means they're not on your side.
I always find it genuinely sad when someone I'd thought was a Person of Principle turns out to be anything but. I'm sure I've mentioned how disappointed I've been over the years to watch Alan Dershowitz morph from a man who took courageous stands against hate crimes and white supremacists to a person who'll advocate damn near anything if it'll get him on camera and add to his fame…
"It certainly doesn't have to be a crime," he said in a television interview in 1998, during the impeachment controversy surrounding President Bill Clinton. "If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of the president and abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don't need a technical crime."
Now, he has a different view. "Without a crime there can be no impeachment," he said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, foreshadowing the formal brief presented Monday by Trump's legal team to the Senate.
He got into one of his famous brawls on CNN on Monday night. Host Anderson Cooper and the network's chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, confronted Dershowitz about his changed opinion. The resulting exchange wasn't pretty.
"So you were wrong then," Cooper said to Dershowitz.
"No, I wasn't wrong. I have a more sophisticated basis for my argument," he said, citing his research into the 1868 impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson. "It's very clear now that what you need is criminal-like behavior akin to bribery and treason."
Later, he insisted, "I wasn't wrong. I am just far more correct now than I was then." Which I guess is better than saying, "No, there was a Democratic president then and the guy being impeached now is a Republican."
It helps me to keep this in mind: In most law schools, they do war games — mock trials where the lawyers of the future practice being both prosecutors and defense attorneys. Law Student Smith argues that the defendant is guilty and Law Student Jones argues he's innocent. Then they take a five-minute break before trying the same case again, only this time Law Student Jones argues that the defendant is guilty and Law Student Smith argues he's innocent.
It's one of the reasons most people hate all lawyers except the one handling their case at the moment. You'd like to believe they stand for Truth and Justice and the bad guy being punished and the innocent guy being cleared. But really it's about winning. And only about winning.