Here is monumental hypocrisy on display. Harvard Law's Noah Feldman, one of the "scholars" who testified in favor of impeaching Donald Trump, argues for Original Intent and insists Trump is the posterboy for what the Founding Fathers intended with impeachment.

From the Bloomberg article:

The reason this matters isn’t that we must somehow be bound by the dead hand of the past, and always interpret the Constitution to mean what the framers intended. To the contrary. The reason the framers’ ideas matter here is that our living Constitution is the product of an ongoing, centuries-long process in which we try to give contemporary meaning to the laws, values, and ideals that the framers specified. That’s why it’s always a good idea to start a conversation about the meaning of the Constitution with what the framers had in mind — and how things have evolved since.

We know with certainty that the framers were deeply focused on the dangers of a too-powerful president. In contrast, we don’t know anything like as much about what the framers would have thought about issues where technology and morality have both evolved, such as abortion rights or gun rights.

We are, or we should be, still worried about a president who abuses his office to corrupt the electoral process, fulfilling framers’ worry that he would "spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected.” That’s why the framers’ views still matter.

NOW this guy worries about what the Founders thought. Where was he when Barack Obama's IRS was suppressing conservative groups opposed to him politically? Or when Obama's Attorney General was meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac during the heighth of the e-mail server scandal? Where was this guy when Bill Clinton brought trumped up charges against Billy Dale and the White House Travel Office so he could put his own people in? Or when Clinton took money from Indonesia via James Riady and Charlie Trie? Where was he when Hillary Clinton wiped her subpeona'd servers? Funny how only now he finds his inner Constitutionalist.

Notice, too, how this man ignores the fact that the President was reacting here as opposed to driving events. What was he reacting too? An attempted coup-de-tat that was in the planning from the moment he won election BY the Bureacracy in cahoots with the former administration. There HAVE been crimes committed, but by the Bidens, by Barack Obama, and by our out of control national security apparatus. Were the Founders alive today they would be far more afraid of the CIA and FBI than a President asking a country to investigate a shady deal by a competitor.

I suspect Feldman is fully aware of this and is simply a liar. A man who believes in a "living Constitution" is essentially a liar, because he wants to alter the meaning of words to get what he wants. So we have established a pattern of dishonesty, and have no reason to believe  this particular attack is any different

Another point to ponder; the Founding Fathers believed that Congress would be a part-time job with Congressmen serving one term and then leaving. Feldman knows that - or should. The idea that Congress would become a professional political class was objectionable to them. Also, they didn't think there would be political parties, or if there were that that there would be many of them. Nobody ever thought America would become this bipolar political system with two parties. That was why the Founders worried more about the Presidency than Congress; they figured Congress was too diffused to be a tyrant. (They also didn't worry at all about the Courts, since they had no money of their own and no enforcement powers.) It didn't work out that way, primarily because of "living Constitution" types like Feldman.

Madison and Jefferson and the rest would be horrified at the unanimity of the Congress as a result of party discipline. They never intended that.

So this scholar is full of s, er, bull.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:27 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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