Dershowitz’s defense argument transcript here.
Alan Dersowitz stated yesterday that extortion is fine if you’re doing it to get reelected.
“As the Senate moves toward pivotal votes on witnesses and the articles of impeachment, Republican senators who decide that Donald Trump’s shakedown of Ukraine was sleazy, but not worth removing him from office, still have a problem. They risk angering a president who insists his actions were “perfect” and beyond reproach.
In the face of a such a dilemma, senators were offered an escape hatch this week by Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz: Don’t worry about what Trump did, Dershowitz assured the senators. You can tell your constituents that if the president didn’t commit a crime, he can’t be impeached and removed from office.” (USA Today)
However, Dershowitz is wrong, according to real constitutional scholars who are not political shills, as well as to Nikolas Bowie, the person he misquotes in his arguments.
What does this leave us with? A president who has reconfigured his Article II power to allow him to freely fire anyone he hates, build anything he wants, assassinate anyone who pisses him off, withhold any of the congressionally appropriated aid he likes, and recall any foreign ambassadors, even for corrupt reasons, or as he put it – “to “do whatever I want as president.” He might as well have said “I am now king.”