If your dispute with Trump and your call for his removal are based on policy (and his language about policy), rather than about discrete factual predicates amounting to legal violations, then you should eschew the language of the criminal law and push forward with debates (in this forum and elsewhere) about the prospective dangers you think Trump is creating or the harms he has already caused. But as I said, the country survived Johnson. To the extent that the argument against Trump is based on his saying stuff you think outrageous, I think the country will survive his talking big. I would also add that Trump has done little (as I see it) which substantially departs from his campaign statements—so a removal based on political disagreement about the expected consequences of policy is not going to be one with a strong democratic justification.
Technical point: It may be that deporting foreigners is not a criminal punishment, but exiling/banishing/deporting Americans who are in the country legally would seem to me to amount to a violation of a 14th Amendment liberty interest. This brings up an important cultural divide in America today (and not just in America, but across the Western world). Many of Trump’s supporters see the elites as being indifferent between their fellow citizens and foreigners. I ask you not to prove them correct.
2 thoughts on “Seth Barrett Tillman: <i>My Post on CONLAWPROF: my response to a discussion about removing Trump from office</i>”
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Elections are the remedy, the only lawful remedy, for policy and style complaints. Removal by force (revolution) carries with it side effects that ought not to justified or exercised without the fundamental and systemic overthrow of our natural rights and institutions proscribed by our founding documents and received and upheld law. Impeachment is reserved for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Your presentation is spot on. I suspect that criminality could have been easier established on the part of Obama than Trump. We shall see, but so far it is a nothing burger on Trump.
Death6
I guess we can add the intelligence community to the growing list of government and quasi-government entities that must be held above criticism by Trump, along with the federal judiciary and the fake news networks. Who knew it would become an impeachable offense to cause bureaucratic pearl clutching?
We’ve come a long way since Johnson tried to nullify the Senate’s powers. We now have the Administrative State not only acting as a legislature, but it looks like they’ve started initiating impeachment proceedings.