Portman had constitutional backing on Trump vote
It’s always entertaining when a journalist or newscaster dons the robe of a judge and pronounces the legal errors of others.
Most recently, Judge Thomas Suddes accused Ohio Sen. Rob Portman of using former President Donald Trump’s defeat as a “dodge” to avoid voting for his impeachment (Sunday column “Portman uses Constitutional dodge on Trump vote”).
Suddes cites a single, 150-year-old case, staffers of the Congressional Research Service (beholden to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) and the silence of the Constitution as his authority that a former president can be impeached, thereby creating an entire new body of law founded on the proposition that the law is determined not by what it says but by what it doesn’t say.
In this new era of popular opinions achieving respect overnight due to the size of credulous audiences, those of us who believe that understanding constitutional law requires scholarship must respond. The ultimate authority on impeachment is one of the authors himself, Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in No. 69 of the Federalist Papers: “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”
Kudos to Portman for both his law degree and his respect for the Constitution. Judge Suddes, you are reversed.
Richard D. Rogovin, Blacklick