Tag: james comey

Professor Corey Brettschneider on The Power of Impeachment

Constitutional Law Professor Corey Brettschneider says it might be time for Congress to have a more open mind as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment.

After the attempted impeachment of the first President Johnson, right after the Civil War, many people said if they succeeded in removing the president– then we could have become more like a parliamentary system. Because it would have meant that the Congress could remove a president not for “high crimes and misdemeanors” but because Congress simply didn’t like the president’s policy. Now, Congress didn’t remove President Johnson back then. And I think it would have been a mistake, a bad precedent, to use impeachment as a sort of no-confidence vote. But I think right now we might look for an in-between. Something between the extreme executive power that we have right now and a Congress more willing to impeach. I believe that in-between would be a more aggressive Congress coupled with more defined judicial limits on what the president can and can’t do.

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Corey Brettschneider is professor of political science at Brown University, where he teaches courses in constitutional law and political theory. He is currently also a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Brettschneider was a visiting professor at Fordham Law School, a Rockefeller faculty fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a visiting associate professor at Harvard Law School, and a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics. Brettschneider received a PhD in politics from Princeton University and a JD from Stanford University. He is the author of When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government (Princeton University Press, 2007). These books have been the subject of several journal symposia, including one most recently published in the Brooklyn Law Review. Brettschneider is also the author of a casebook, Constitutional Law and American Democracy: Cases and Readings (Aspen Publishers/Wolters Kluwer Law and Business, 2011). His articles include “Sovereign and State: A Democratic Theory of Sovereign Immunity,” forthcoming in Texas Law Review; “Value Democracy as the Basis for Viewpoint Neutrality,” in Northwestern Law Review (2013); “A Transformative Theory of Religious Freedom,” in Political Theory (2010); “When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? Democratic Persuasion and the Freedom of Expression,” in Perspectives on Politics (2010); and “The Politics of the Personal: A Liberal Approach,” in the American Political Science Review (2007).

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World Politics Review’s Judah Grunstein 

Judah Grunstein the editor chief of World Politics Review, reports from Paris on France’s new President and what that means for both the French safety net and stability inEurope. Judah also explains the situation in Qatar and why it’s a flashpoint Americans must pay attention to. Judah also attempts to disabuse David of the notion that life is better in France than here in America.
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Professor Corey Brettschneider Talks Impeachment

Constitutional Scholar Corey Brettschneider talks to us about what Donald Trump’s impeachment would take, and why cynicism might be America’s worst enemy. Professor Brettschneider is author of “When The State Speaks.” On today’s show he tells David,

The Republican Party has a long tradition of caring about the Constitution. It’s not too long ago that the Tea Party’s main thing was careful reading or a strict reading of the Constitution, and I have to believe that there is some percentage of Republican members of the House of Representatives who still care about the Constitution. And if that’s right, and I’m sure it is, they’ve got to find the strength and the courage to stand up and say, “No.” If the president was deliberately impeding an investigation of himself by firing the FBI director then that’s an impeachable offense. That’s their obligation. And it’s not about party. The Republican Party cannot survive it if it’s just the party of Donald Trump. It’s also supposed to be, like the Democrats, a party of constitutional principle.

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The Intercept’s Mattathias Schwartz on Comey’s Firing (Full Interview)


Mattathias Schwartz is a national security reporter for The Intercept. He has served as a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and is currently a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. For more visit www.theintercept.com
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