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Greetings dear listeners this is Jonah Goldberg this is another exciting episode of the Remnant Podcast which is brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media the new media platform company thing of

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our my friend and a colleague Adam White welcome back to the Remnant it's good to be back you can you can stop me you can only help to contain me.

So what is the way one of the here is there's there's there's this is sort of an impeachment 101 episode we may have some tangents that we have to deal with but

impeachment's heating up you're like a law guy with like a belt and everything right that's what Troy I think it was Troy McClure in the Simpson says I'm not one of those fancy lawyers wears belts.

But I thought you're gonna say who's the lawyer the one that's why you're the judge and I'm the law talking guy that's right yeah I was

Troy McClure same voice different guy he's the Hollywood actor who at one point when Homer says I know your terrible secret your gay and he yells gay I wish they don't have a word for what I am.

All right so you might you might know me from such podcasts as impeachment 101 that's right there we go or or zinc and you partners in freedom which is one of the Troy McClure after school specials.

We're not old or anything so impeachment stuff yeah I don't have a precise road map of how I want to get into this but I'm gonna ask you a few questions that have been just bugging the hell out of me and then we can take it from there.

The Republicans are friends the Republicans have been saying that they don't have to comply with impeachment subpoenas and work with the process because this is a sham process your position is that it's a politically problematic thing but it's not a constitutional sham.

Why don't you just sort of lay out your your perspective on on all of it.

And the way you introduced me is actually a good place to start you said I'm the law guy I think one of the dangers in talking about impeachment is taking it too legalistically right our our colleague Gary Schmidt once told the New York Times the Constitution is too important to leave it to the lawyers right and this is a classic example of that the Constitution is law obviously it has procedures of a sort for impeachment I mean very minimal most of it is left to the branches to sort out for themselves and the ultimate standard at issue high crimes and misdemeanors and so on.

That's a definitely legal standard it's there in the law but it's not the kind of thing that courts have chewed on it's not the kind of thing that's susceptible to sort of easy sort of straightforward interpretation by anybody it ultimately opens up some political questions which is not to say that it's just anything goes.

I often hear people say well impeachment is whatever the an impeachment offense is whatever the Senate says it is I guess that's true in a sense but it shouldn't be true right the term

the term high crimes and misdemeanors it's a higher standard than just when we put it this way if presidents could be impeached for anything the Senate wanted to have them impeached for the Constitution would just say presidents can be impeached the framers put a term in there we got to take it seriously but take it seriously in the right way which is thinking about sort of the role of the president and the duties of the president right but in the other sense it is whatever Congress decides because it's not like the Supreme Court

not like the Supreme Court is going to review this right right so that's true it's whatever it's whatever the legislature can get away with is ultimately for good or for ill intellectually dishonest politically ill advised or not if the House votes to impeach and the Senate votes to remove that's unreviewed I mean the president Trump at one point said he would appeal any impeachment to the Supreme Court which is not a thing right yeah it's just buffoonery all right

it's just buffoonery ultimately the only place that's going to sit and review of the House and Senate's work is the people in the judgment of history right right and are you are going to which I totally agree with is that the way the Democrats have been handling recording this on Tuesday afternoon

to date the way the Democrats have been handling this has been legal and constitutional but not very statesmen like and not politically very well advised right is that fair to say how you come down on it right I thought of the way that the House Democrats started things and the House Democrats

started things and then the way the White House Council's office reacted was just the worst possible example of how this could play out it's true the House is not bound to certain requirements of cross examination or other forms of due process the White House is calling for this it's not required it would be a good thing for them to do something along those lines or allow some form of transparency if they want their process and the outcome in the House to be taken seriously not as a set of allegations but as a meaningful judgment

and when the White House Council's office replied with that letter that began with legalistic legal arguments saying the president was entitled to certain measures of due process and cross examination because it had been done before and that to not do that now somehow delegitimizes the process they're going too far there it's just one of those examples where everybody seems to retreat to the corners and hire the lawyers

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