Tag: Laurence Tribe

Harvard Law Professor Explains Why Donald Trump’s Free Speech Defense May Not Stick

Laurence Tribe likened the former president to a fire chief “urging a mob to burn the theater down.”

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe has poured cold water on the free speech defense being put forward by former President Donald Trump’s legal team ahead of his Senate impeachment trial for inciting the deadly U.S. Capitol riot.

Trump impeachment counsel David Schoen argued in an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday that the former president’s provocative comments to his supporters before they ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, for which the House impeached Trump for a second time last month, was actually protected by the First Amendment.

“We can’t control the reaction of the audience,” Schoen was quoted as saying. Continue reading.

Harvard Law Professor Hits Donald Trump With The Cold Truth: ‘You Are A Loser’

“You’ve got to move on,” Laurence Tribe told the president.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Tuesday condemned President Donald Trump’s futile bid to overturn the 2020 election result.

“Mr. Trump, you have lost,” Tribe said on CNN’s “Outfront” after the Supreme Court dismissed a Republican attempt to reverse Pennsylvania’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the state.

“You’ve got to move on,” the commentator continued, noting that the United States needs to focus on things like the coronavirus pandemic and national security, not litigating the election. Continue reading.

Exactly what Alexander Hamilton ‘darkly envisioned’: Constitutional law professor explains how Trump is sabotaging the presidency from within

AlterNet logoCritics of President Donald Trump have often used the word “unpresidential” when describing his over-the-top antics . But legal scholar/author Laurence H. Tribe, in a November 18 article for Newsweek, stresses that with impeachment hearings underway, it is becoming more and more obvious that Trump is way beyond “unpresidential” — he has become the “anti-president” that Founding Father Alexander Hamilton warned about in the 1780s and 1790s.

“More than unpresidential, Trump represents the perfect exemplar of what Alexander Hamilton darkly envisioned when he described the danger that a demagogue might one day assume the presidency and require removal through the awesome power of impeachment,” explains the 78-year-old Tribe, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard University. “Such a demagogue, Hamilton prophesied, would be ‘a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…. despotic in his ordinary demeanor.’”

Hamilton, Tribe adds, feared the emergence of a charlatan who would “take every opportunity” to bring the federal government “under suspicion” and “throw things into confusion” — and Trump, according to Tribe, fits that description perfectly.

View the complete November 19 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Legal scholar Laurence Tribe: Framers would impeach Trump immediately

AlterNet logoHouse Democrats continue to move in a plodding and methodical way toward the impeachment of Donald Trump. On Aug. 8, the House Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., announced the formal launch of impeachment proceedings.

But the Democratic Party’s leadership is also sending mixed signals, vacillating between being relatively direct about their desire to remove Trump from office and then signaling a clear lack of enthusiasm for actually doing so.

It may soon be too late to impeach and remove Donald Trump from the presidency before he has done irreparable harm to American democracy — and perhaps before he moves to an even more dangerous stage in his fascist-authoritarian campaign to usurp the rule of law in his favor.

View the complete August 22 article by Chauncey DeVega from Salon on the AlterNet website here.