Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan was off base to make a joke about President Trump’s youngest son, Barron, during yesterday’s House impeachment hearings, but she was the most persuasive and passionate of the three Democratic witnesses who said the evidence and testimony presented to the House Intelligence Committee warranted impeachment.
Here is the transcript of Karlan’s opening statement, with a couple of deletions for space…
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Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:
Today, you are being asked to consider whether protecting…elections requires impeaching a President. That is an awesome responsibility. But everything I know about our Constitution and its values, and my review of the evidentiary record, tells me that when President Trump invited — indeed, demanded — foreign involvement in our upcoming election, he struck at the very heart of what makes this country the “republic” to which we pledge allegiance.
That demand constituted an abuse of power. Indeed, as I want to explain in my testimony, drawing a foreign government into our elections is an especially serious abuse of power because it undermines democracy itself.
Pamela Karlan
Our Constitution begins with the words “We the People” for a reason. Our government, in James Madison’s words, “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people.” And the way it derives these powers is through elections. Elections matter — both to the legitimacy of our government and to all our individual freedoms — because, as the Supreme Court explained more than a century ago, voting is “preservative of all rights.”
So it is hardly surprising that the Constitution is marbled with provisions governing elections and guaranteeing governmental accountability. Indeed, a majority of our amendments to the Constitution since the Civil War deal with voting and terms for elective office.
…But the Framers of our Constitution realized that elections alone could not guarantee that the United States would remain a republic. One of the key reasons for including the impeachment power was the risk that unscrupulous officials might try to rig the election process. At the Constitutional Convention, William Davie warned that unless the Constitution contained an impeachment provision, a president might “spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected.”
And George Mason insisted that a president who “procured his appointment in the first instance” through improper and corrupt acts should not “escape punishment, by repeating his guilt.” Mason was responsible for adding “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” to the list of impeachable offenses. So we know that that list was designed to reach a president who acts to subvert an election — whether it is the election that brought him into office or an upcoming election where he seeks a second term. Moreover, the Founding Generation, like every generation of Americans since, was especially concerned to protect our government and our democratic process from outside interference.
For example, John Adams expressed concern with the very idea of having an elected President, writing to Thomas Jefferson that “You are apprehensive of foreign Interference, Intrigue, Influence. So am I. But, as often as elections happen, the danger of foreign Influence recurs.” And in his Farewell Address, President Washington warned that “history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
The very idea that a President might seek the aid of a foreign government in his re-election campaign would have horrified them. But based on the evidentiary record, that is what President Trump has done. The list of impeachable offenses the Framers included in the Constitution shows that the essence of an impeachable offense is a president’s decision to sacrifice the national interest for his own private ends. “Treason” lay in an individual’s giving aid to a foreign enemy — that is, putting a foreign adversary’s interests above the United States’. “Bribery” occurred when an official solicited, received, or offered a personal favor or benefit to influence official action — that is, putting his private welfare above the national interest. And “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” captured the other ways in which a high official might, as Justice Joseph Story explained, “disregard…public interests, in the discharge of the duties of political office.”
Based on the evidentiary record before you, what has happened in the case is something that I do not think we have ever seen before: a president who has doubled down on violating his oath to “faithfully execute” the laws and to “protect and defend the Constitution.” The evidence reveals a President who used the powers of his office to demand that a foreign government participate in undermining a competing candidate for the presidency. As President Kennedy declared, “[t]he right to vote in a free American election is the most powerful and precious right in the world.” But our elections become less free when they are distorted by foreign interference.
What happened in 2016 was bad enough: there is widespread agreement that Russian operatives intervened to manipulate our political process. But that distortion is magnified if a sitting president abuses the powers of his office actually to invite foreign intervention. To see why, imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that’s prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if, when your governor asked the federal government for the disaster assistance that Congress had provided, the President responded, “I would like you to do us a favor. I’ll meet with you and send the disaster relief once you brand my opponent a criminal.”?
Wouldn’t you know in your gut that such a president had abused his office, betrayed the national interest, and tried to corrupt the electoral process? I believe the evidentiary record shows wrongful acts on that scale here. It shows a president who delayed meeting a foreign leader and providing assistance that Congress and his own advisors agreed serve our national interest in promoting democracy and limiting Russian aggression.
Saying, “Russia, if you’re listening…?” You know, a president who cared about the Constitution would say, “Russia, if you’re listening, butt out of our elections!”
It shows a president who did this to strong arm a foreign leader into smearing one of the president’s opponents in our ongoing election season. That is not politics as usual — at least not in the United States or any other mature democracy. It is, instead, a cardinal reason why the Constitution contains an impeachment power. Put simply, a candidate for president should resist foreign interference in our elections, not demand it and not welcome it.
If we are to keep faith with the Constitution and with our Republic, President Trump must be held to account.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I wish I could have a few words with Mr. Nadler regarding his remarks on the close of the hearings yesterday (December 4). I would plea with him to stick to what President Trump has done in the past, not with what he might do in the future. Mr. Nadler said, “if these abuses go unchecked they will only continue”. Mr. Nadler’s speculation is only speculation and undermines the strength of the evidence currently available. Stay with what is provable.
I was moved by the testimony of Pamela Karlan, speaking with such intensity that she was not interrupted. I did a little arm waving in front of my computer. Then I did a little backtracking to discover what brainless idiot had dragged a minor child — Barron Trump — into the fray, and learned it was none other than Pamela Karlan.
Fitz, you’re approaching this as the thorough reporter that you’ve been, but most people live in a world of sound bites and memes. Here are some from yesterday.
Nadler opening the hearing with an outright lie, claiming that their were undisputed facts. There are no undisputed facts.
You are correct about Pamela Karlan. The other two Democrat witnesses failed to even register, but the only thing that did register with people, on both sides, was her comment about Barron Trump. Melania Trump responded almost immediately on Twitter and blew it up so badly that it crashed repeatedly whenever i tried to slow the comments down enough to read them. What I did see was a hatefulness from both sides that, were they not online, clearly, violence would have ensued.
Within hours there were pictures of Karlan with Eric Holder and standing at a protest in one of the pink Hensley hats. Her resume is a caricature of the hated, liberal “swamp”. Educated at Yale, radical leftist, worked for Obama and now employed at Stanford in, of course, California. Her Wikipedia profile lists Viola Canales as her “Domestic partner”, triggering Trump’s evangelical and largely blue collar base. And, her apology was so clearly insincere that it only served to further inflame people against her.
Two other sound bites were making the rounds, The first was Turley’s comments about people being mad, but that mad is not an impeachable offense. And finally, Rep. Gaetz became the Republican star of the show with this performance broadcast on CNN, ending with the question as to whether any of the panelists had personal knowledge of a single material fact in the Schiff report. None did.
The only outcome of these hearings thus far has been to further inflame and divide the country and thanks to the testimony of effete, disconnected snobs like Pamela Karlan, the polls indicate that they may well be serving the President’s re-election efforts.
I’m sorry John, anyone who thinks they want Gaetz to be the forward face of their party or these hearings has some serious reality issues with the guy (though he pretty well sums up the entire Republican Party today). Someone like Devin Nunes better pray Trump is re-elected or he is probably heading to jail for perjury based the released phone records and his now non-denial denials.
Turley is two-faced as if you look back he said virtually the opposite when Clinton was impeached. However, if he wants to keep those Fox News hits coming, he needs to flip-flop.
And it is absolutely hilarious that Republicans and Trump who railed on Obama for making the U.S. look weak are literally made to look like idiots when the leaders of our foremost allies on video and audio are discussing what a joke Trump truly is. And Trump immediately left the meeting because he could not stand the criticism. Anyone who thinks the U.S. is more respected today in the world than 4 years ago is not living in reality.
And for helping Trump’s re-election efforts, Brad Parscale is posting on Twitter GOP polling on certain Democratic reps in toss up districts. Yesterday he posted the results on the representative that was elected from the Oklahoma City area crowing about how bad the results were for her. However, as several of the polling experts wondered why Parscale would even post this poll. It showed in a district that went +17 for Trump in 2016 now has 45% of voters supporting impeachment. That is a big swing to just +5 for Trump. Considering how Trump won the electoral college last time by less than 100,000 votes, he can’t hemorrhage support like this.
Nobody is going to do anything to convince Republicans to abandon Trump. The party has surrendered to him. All of the things the Republican Party has stood for over the years are just being thrown out the window. There was a good column in The Star today with an interview with Rick Wilson. He has a good assessment of where the Republican party is today and will be the next few years.
The Republican voter base is aging, white and is decreasing. Also the educated are fleeing the party. As Rick Wilson said, the Republican base now are Reality TV watchers who think Reality TV is real life.
The average age of a white in the U.S. now is 58 years old. For every other racial group in the country the average age is in the 20s. It’s literally panic time for the racist component of Trump’s and Republican support. As a Trump supporter recently said “if you are not cheating, you aren’t trying to win” and winning and owning whichever group they care to antagonize today has become their sole goals. Shredding the norms and the Constitution be damned if that is what they need to do to keep power.
I do not think there are many people who have not made up their mind for November 2020. It is either Trump or anyone else. The only reachable folks are people who did not vote in 2016. Even Trump’s campaign realizes this and are supposedly directing resources into this. Every thing happening now is just marking positions and setting the stakes that the 2020 election will have.
I just saw yesterday that young voter registration has increased the overall potential voter total in Georgia and Texas by 3% due to Democratic voter drives. That new 3% is not voting Trump or Republican. That just pushes those states closer to their long projected move to the Democratic Party column. Once that happens, the Republicans can turn out the lights on winning a national election again until the party has a major platform and attitude adjustment. This is why the Republicans are so intent on putting things in place during this administration and judges to allow the minority to rule majority as long as possible. They know their window is closing.
I appreciate both of your thoughts and the dialogue, but both are much too long. I already told John, in an email, to try to keep comments to about 150 words, and now, Bill, I’ll advise the same for you.
To take stock of where we are on these three comments, Peg Nichols’ is 139 words, John’s is 322 and, Bill, yours is 669!
Peg gets the blue ribbon for clarity and conciseness. I encourage all readers to follow her lead when it comes to comments.
And with that, we’ll close the comments on this blog. Onward and upward!