Constitutional Argument

I watched Alan Dershowitz make his presentation to the Senate last evening. He’s a good speaker. Book him at your local Rotary club. He can be entertaining.

I was less impressed with his legal argument. It seemed more like an eighth grade book report than a rigorous legal debate. He spent some time in the library where he read old books and picked out select passages that supported his opinions. Good for him for taking the time to do a bit of research. At least he didn’t make up this nonsense on his own.

Particularly brazen was Mr. Dershowitz’s attempt to downplay the current president’s quid pro quo by posing a hypothetical example involving Israel. “What if the US tried aid to a demand that Israel stop building settlements in Palestinian territory?”

Well, if that were to happen, it would be a case where foreign aid is tied to a formal policy objective. If the Department of State concluded that Israeli settlements were causing security issues and wanted to discourage the practice, they could work with Congress to make the aid contingent on a set of actions and conditions that supported their policy.

Congress did exactly this with the aid package that it approved for Ukraine. They demanded that Ukraine meet certain conditions before they could receive the money. Ukraine met all of the stated conditions. There was no legitimate reason to hold the money back. In fact, to do so was a violation of the law.

Mr. Dershowitz should have modified his example to more closely fit what actually happened.

“What if a Democratic president withheld aid that Congress had approved for Israel, and for which Israel had met all of the necessary conditions, in an effort to coerce the Israeli government into investigating Ivanka Trump’s international business dealings?”

That would clearly be a violation of the law. We would recognize it as an abuse of power. I think that most of us would consider it to be an impeachable offense.

Mr. Dershowitz admitted toward the end of his presentation that most legal scholars would not agree with his conclusions. I supposed that unlike his boss, he has a conscience, and that conscience got the best of him. Apparently, he couldn’t bring himself to make a farcical argument without a wink that his conclusions might be far-fetched.

I have to wonder how former Harvard Law School students felt about this presentation. Some of them spent a lot of money to listen to this gentleman spin his wild theories. I might have asked for a refund.