Saturday, Senate candidate former Chief Justice Roy Moore (R) said that the impeachment case against President Donald J. Trump, “Is politics as usual.”
The Alabama Political Reporter asked Moore to comment on the case that House case managers, led by House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-California, made in their opening remarks.
“This is clearly “not “an impeachable offense under Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution, and neither Adam Schiff’s comments or Nancy Pelosi’s rhetoric can make it so,” Judge Moore told APR. “This is politics as usual and a disparagement of the Constitutional principles our forefathers sought to preserve.”
Moore, in a Foundation for Moral Law statement on Thursday, warned that if the U.S. Senate fails to vote “No” on the impeachment charges against President Donald J. Trump (R) it “Will seriously depreciate the Office of the President.
Judge Roy Moore is the Founder and President Emeritus of the Montgomery based Foundation for Moral Law. Roy Moore is also a candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.
“To legitimize this proceeding will seriously depreciate the Office of the President and effectively destroy the separation of powers essential to our constitutional form of government,” Judge Moore said in a statement.
Foundation President Kayla Moore observed that “Less than ten months from today, the American people will exercise their constitutional right to pass judgment upon the Presidency of Donald Trump by voting for him or against him in the November election. Unfortunately, impeachment advocates want to deprive the American people of this constitutional right by undoing the results of the 2016 election and foreclosing the results of the 2020 election.”
The Foundation for Moral Law is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the strict interpretation of the Constitution. The Foundation is urging that the United States Senate vote “no” on the articles of impeachment against President Trump.
“Our reason is clear and simple: the articles of impeachment simply do not satisfy the requirements for impeachment and removal under the Constitution,” said Foundation Senior Counsel John Eidsmoe. “Article II, Section 4 sets forth the grounds for impeachment and removal: ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.’ The allegations contained in these articles of impeachment (abuse of power and obstruction of Congress), even if true, do not constitute treason. They do not constitute bribery. They do not constitute high crimes. They do not constitute misdemeanors. The message of the articles is unmistakable: ‘There are no constitutional grounds for impeachment, but impeach him anyway!’”
The Foundation claims the articles of impeachment “Constitute a partisan attempt to remove a President who has stood against the radical agenda of the Left wing of the Democratic Party. Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 65 of the danger that impeachment proceedings: “…will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
The Foundation observed that the first impeachment of a President, Andrew Johnson, was conducted in like manner by a radical Republican majority of the Congress. His removal in the Senate was prevented by the vote of Senator Edmund Ross, a Kansas Republican who later explained that: “In a large sense the independence of the executive office as a coordinate branch of government was on trial. If … the President must step down … a disgraced man … upon insufficient proofs and from partisan consideration, the office of President would be degraded.”
Chairman Schiff has called the position that the House Democrats’ charges do not rise to the level of impeachment “absurdist.”
“Well it’s the same position that was successfully argued by former Justice Benjamin Curtis in the trial of Andrew Johnson,” Trump defense team member Alan Dershowitz told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “Andrew Johnson was impeached in part for non-criminal conduct. And Curtis, who was the dissenting judge in the Dred Scott case and one of the most eminent jurists in American history, made the argument that has been called absurdist, namely that when you read the text of the Constitution — bribery, treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors — other really means that crimes and misdemeanors must be of kin — akin to treason and bribery.”
“And he argued, very successfully, winning the case, that you needed proof of an actual crime. It needn’t be a statutory crime, but it has to be criminal behavior, criminal in nature. And the allegations in the Johnson case were much akin to the allegations here — abusive conduct, obstructive conduct — and that lost. So I am making an argument much like the argument made by the great Justice Curtis. And to call them absurdist is to, you know, insult one of the greatest jurists in American history. The argument is a strong one. The Senate should hear it. I’m privileged to be able to make it. I have a limited role in the case. I’m only in the case as of counsel on the constitutional criteria for impeachment. I’m not involved in the strategic decisions about witnesses or facts. But I will make a strong argument that Justice Curtis was correct and that Congress was wrong in impeaching for these two articles.”
“I strongly believe that abuse of power is so open-ended — half of American presidents in history, from Adams to Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt, have been accused by their political enemies of abusing their power,” Dershowitz said. “The framers didn’t want to have that kind of criteria in the Constitution because it weaponizes impeachment for partisan purposes.”
The House Democrats have finished their opening statements and now the President’s defense is making their case that the President is not guilty of an impeachable offence.
The Republican primary is on March 3.
Judge Moore was the Republican nominee for Senate in the 2017 Special Election and narrowly lost the December Special Election to Clinton era U.S. Attorney Doug Jones. Moore is seeking the Republican nomination to run against Jones in November.
