This UNC professor testified on impeachment. Here’s what he learned from it.
A day after the House impeached President Trump, I caught up with Michael Gerhardt, the UNC professor and constitutional law expert who testified to the House Judiciary Committee that Trump’s actions merited impeachment.
When I reached him Thursday afternoon by phone, he was on a train traveling from New York to Washington, D.C. , to do a roundtable media interview and some consulting work. His path would take him through Philadelphia, where the Constitution was launched, and on to the nation’s capital, where it seems to have run aground. More than two centuries after breaking free of King George, the United States appears unable to cut itself loose from King Donald.
Gerhardt tried his best to make the case that the president’s asking Ukraine to meddle in the U.S election for his benefit and his subsequent stonewalling of House subpoenas were exactly the kinds of actions the Constitution’s framers tried to prevent or punish by adding the impeachment provision. He testified, “I cannot help but conclude that this president has attacked each of the Constitution’s safeguards against establishing a monarchy in this country.”
But the author of the book “Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know” soon learned that not everyone wanted to hear it. After his testimony, Gerhardt said he received “several hundred” emails.
“Most of it was hate mail,” he said, “but I got some very nice responses, so I’ll just focus on that.” He expected negative comments, but he was surprised by the volume. “I just didn’t realize how many people felt the need to track down my contact information and send an email.”
Gerhardt, 63, has testified before Congress more than 20 times, including appearing as the only joint witness in the 1998 hearing on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. But this time he said the reaction from Republican committee members was different. He found the raw partisan atmosphere in the hearing room “very sad.”
The histrionics of the Republican members, he said, reminded him of poet Carl Sandburg’s oft-cited quote: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”
Asked if the committee’s impeachment debate was grist for another book, Gerhardt said the discussion was beyond his area of expertise. “It would have to be written by a sociologist,” he said. “The law was an afterthought.”
Gerhardt said the case against Trump may be the strongest of the three brought against impeached U.S. presidents. Though President Richard Nixon resigned before being impeached, the articles of impeachment that were being drawn against him were closest to those drawn against Trump.
The outcome, of course, is very different. No House Republicans broke ranks to support impeachment and the Senate’s Republican majority has all but acquitted Trump before the Senate trial. Gerhardt said the Constitution doesn’t require Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to conduct a fair trial. “If he has 51 senators, he can do whatever he wants,” the law professor said.
The hardening of party lines may make the impeachment process inoperable, Gerhardt said: “I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that it might be broken.”
Could that also mean that relentless partisanship may also undermine the Constitution? Could a president ride party support to a level that puts him above the law?
“I try not to think about those things too much. It can be depressing,” Gerhardt said as he rolled toward the capital named for the president who refused to be made a king.