Should Trump Leave Twitter?

Some of the largest expansions of government power and unconstitutional abuses have come during times of pressing crises, not unlike the coronavirus. The government routinely tries to paper over these abuses by saying they are temporary, and that anyone who resists is guilty of making the present crisis worse. It’s the same story over and over again.

At the conclusion of his opening statement regarding impeachment before the House Judiciary Committee on December 4th, Professor Jonathan Turley mentioned a famous scene from the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. In this particular scene, Sir Thomas More -- the venerated English lawyer and statesman who famously opposed the tyranny of King Henry VIII -- is criticized by his son-in-law, William Roper, for putting the law before morality and “God’s law.” In a brilliant retort, More asks Roper if he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Roper responds that he would “cut down every law in England to do that!”

“From the beginning - that is to say, from November 9, 2016 - impeachment has been a cause in search of a trigger, an occasion,” wrote Michael Anton in the Claremont Review of Books, and then he reviews the time and cost of the Mueller report. “It only took two years, $32 million, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents and other staff, 2,800 subpoenas, and 500 witnesses for a special counsel to “not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Concerning the impeachment of President Trump, James Piereson, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, published in the New Criterion “Break the Wrong Ground.” Piereson writes, “The subject of impeachment has always been accompanied by solemn pronouncements that it must be invoked sparingly, never for narrow partisan or political purposes, and used in extreme cases to preserve the Constitution and the rule of law against a president who has violated his oath of office.” This was also the view of Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz as reported in my FreedomWorks Blog, “The Framers of the Constitution Warned Against a Partisan Impeachment Process” “A partisan impeachment vote is exactly what the Framers feared,” Dershowitz wrote. “Impeachment is an extraordinary tool to be used only when the constitutional criteria are met. These criteria are limited and include only ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”