The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Two guests today.

Samuel Moyne will consider the political snares of impeaching Trump and then at the bottom of the hour, Thomas

Seu will evaluate the great merits of Bernie Sanders' climate plan.

First, Trump.

Sure, he's odious in so many ways, and it would be nice to see the back of him.

But his impeachment the way to do that with an election fewer than 400 days away?

Here's Samuel Moyne, a professor of law and history at Yale with some answers.

Samuel Moyne. Let's start with a question of law since you are a law professor.

Impeachment. What is the standard of impeachable offense? Is the Constitution specific on that?

The phrasing does seem not terribly precise.

So what's your understanding of it as the law professor side of you?

You can take kind of two attacks on what it might mean.

You can do a historical dive into what the phrase high crimes and misdemeanors might have met.

The trouble is that kind of not many people agree about that and they're just contending views. I think everyone is sure that it's not exactly the same as whatever is illegal. It could embrace broader moral transgressions or just general

on fitness. And so Donald Trump is definitely eligible. The real answer, the second more strategic answer was given by Gerald Ford, I believe, when he said what counts as a high crime and misdemeanor is whatever the Congress feels like it is at a

current moment in history.

And so it seems like we're at such a moment when the Congress will get to define this particular action and maybe broader things as high crime and misdemeanor or impeachable offense.

So it's more of a political category than a legal one?

Absolutely and even if it were there were a way and with other kinds of wrongdoers to say

there's a law that's apolitical. When it comes to

presidents, there's no way to say that his impeachment and removal would not be

highly political.

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