UNC professor who wrote a book on impeachment tells Congress Trump should be impeached
Updated Dec. 4 with testimony.
A law professor from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill testified during a House committee hearing Wednesday that President Donald Trump “has committed several impeachable offenses.”
Michael Gerhardt, a distinguished professor at the UNC School of Law, recently published “Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He testified Wednesday as the House Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on the constitutional grounds for impeaching Trump.
“The record compiled thus far shows that the president has committed several impeachable offenses, including bribery, abuse of power in soliciting a personal favor from a foreign leader to benefit his political campaign, obstructing Congress, and obstructing justice,” Gerhardt wrote in written testimony released by the committee.
House Democrats, led by Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, have been investigating Trump and his actions with Ukraine.
The majority on the Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday, noting, “President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign.”
The president denies what he did was improper and has declined to participate in the hearing.
Gerhardt, an expert on constitutional law, was joined by three other law professors to discuss what the Constitution says about impeachment. Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman and Stanford Law School professor Pamela S. Karlan also testified that Trump’s actions were impeachable.
“The gravity of the president’s misconduct is apparent when we compare it to the misconduct of the one president who resigned from office to avoid certain impeachment, conviction, and removal,” Gerhardt wrote.
“If Congress fails to impeach here, then the impeachment process has lost all meaning, and, along with that, our Constitution’s carefully crafted safeguards against the establishment of a king on American soil. No one, not even the president, is beyond the reach of our Constitution and our laws,” Gerhardt concluded.
But witness Johnathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, disagreed with his fellow scholars.
“I am concerned about lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger. If the House proceeds solely on the Ukrainian allegations, this impeachment would stand out among modern impeachments as the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president,” he wrote in his written testimony.
The House impeached Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, but the Senate did not convict either one and they remained in office. President Richard Nixon was facing impeachment when he resigned from office.
Gerhardt’s book, published last year, discusses those cases and “defines the scope of impeachable offenses, and how the Constitution provides alternative procedures and sanctions for addressing misconduct in office,” according to its publisher, Oxford University Press.
This won’t be Gerhardt’s first rodeo. He’s testified before Congress a dozen times before, “including as the only joint witness in the Clinton impeachment proceedings in the House; speaking behind closed doors to the entire House of Representatives about the history of impeachment in 1998,” according to UNC.
He also served “as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee for seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices,” UNC said in his faculty biography.
This story was originally published December 3, 2019 at 3:41 PM.
