There goes Professor Morrison!!!

This is the third (in three days) and final, for now, of a series of  impeachment-related Comments of the Day by Ethics Alarms loyalist and ace  Glenn Logan. He’s authored a couple more COTD-worthy posts since this one went up two days ago; at this rate, I might just turn the blog over to him and Mrs. Q (whose latest column is coming!) and retire to beachcombing and directing satirical musical reviews.

In his latest, Glenn did me a favor and defenestrated George Washington law professor, Alan Morrison’s depressingly lame attempt to rebut Jonathan Turley’s superb explanation of why the House’s impeachment ploy was misguided and wrong.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up. 12/14/19: Insulting George Washington And Other Annoyances”:

Morrison complains that the House cannot obtain the information they need to impeach Trump or not because Trump insists on is right as the head of an equal branch of government to have the House demands on the executive subjected to judicial scrutiny.

Therefore, his claim is that the House has no choice but to infer whatever it can from the witnesses who have testified so they can get the President impeached before the election.

This is not just a weak argument, but a completely specious one. The President:

a) considers the investigation illegitimate and partisan, and;

b) has a duty to protect his office against just such an illegitimate partisan investigation by legitimately referring such demands to the courts.

Morrison doesn’t even consider these factors in his moan, adopting the position that the Congress is a superior branch of government because it has the power to remove a President, and the President should comply with their investigation whether he thinks it is legitimate or not.

Impeachment isn’t the only remedy for an out-of-control chief executive. The nation has another remedy for such a person — it’s called an “election.” If it were obvious to the nation, as might happen in a prolonged and careful investigation, that Trump was such a threat, an election should prove as good a remedy as impeachment and removal. Even better, because claims of a partisan witch hunt will have been vindicated or not by the voters. Impeachment isn’t intended as a way to put a scarlet letter on a rogue executive, but to remove him to protect the country. So why the haste?

The only reason the House can possibly justify its timeline is that the real intent of this investigation is to damage the political prospects of Trump so he won’t be re-elected. That is not the purpose of impeachment, and the founders rightly worried about it to the point of nearly excluding the impeachment remedy from the Constitution.

Morrison isn’t making an argument, he’s just unhappy that Trump is exercising his rights — rights that he implies are totally legitimate, but he somehow expect that Trump should surrender them in order to facilitate his own removal from office.

That is, frankly, insane. It’s prima facia evidence of a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.