Congress does not have the power to conduct an impeachment trial for any officer after he stepped down, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz argued on Monday “Hannity”.
The House is scheduled to vote on a resolution for President Trump’s impeachment on Wednesday in connection with last week’s riot in the Capitol building. If the resolution passes, Trump will be the first president to be charged twice by the House of Representatives.
“All Democrats want is simply his impeachment,” said Dershowitz, who was part of Trump’s defense team at his first Senate impeachment trial last year. “They can do that. All you need is to have the votes, the majority and [Alexander] Hamilton warned against impeachment simply because he had a majority.
“But they don’t really want to put him on trial,” added Dershowitz. “They just want the prosecution to hang over him. It would be like a prosecutor indicting someone for a serious crime and then saying, ‘But we’re not going to give you a trial where you can prove your innocence.'”
Dershowitz insisted that Congress “has no jurisdiction” over Trump after he left the White House.
“The Constitution talks about impeachment as a mechanism to remove someone from office. It also says that if you remove him from office, you can further disqualify him, but there can simply be a trial to disqualify him from the candidacy in 2024, ” he said.
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Dershowitz also poured cold water on the claims of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans that Trump incited a riot when he told rally participants to “go” to the Capitol.
“It happened 100 times at the Capitol,” said Dershowitz. “This is the quintessential American political rhetoric protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.”