The Creepy Lawyer Who Looks Like Benedict Cumberbatch Says Trump’s Not Impeached UNTIL The Articles Go To The Senate.

Well.  This is an interesting twist, indeed.

Remember that creepy lawyer dude, Noah Feldman, who testified that Trump deserves #ALLTHEIMPEACHING because he’s basically the worst person ever and everything he’s ever done as president has been wrong?

I’m paraphrasing, obvs.

But yeah – I’m talking about this dude (YOU KNOW HE LOOKS LIKE BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH YOU GUYS):

Anyway, he has written a big fat op-ed in which he says some pretty fascinating things.  Namely, this:

Impeachment as contemplated by the Constitution does not consist merely of the vote by the House, but of the process of sending the articles to the Senate for trial. Both parts are necessary to make an impeachment under the Constitution: The House must actually send the articles and send managers to the Senate to prosecute the impeachment. And the Senate must actually hold a trial.

If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president. If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.

It’ll be really interesting to see how quickly Democrats disavow this brilliant Harvard lawyer that they were so in love with just days ago.

I’m not a lawyer, nor am I a constitutional expert, so I have to rely on Cumberbatch and others to explain the impeachment process.  And Cumberbatch is saying pretty clearly that Trump hasn’t really been impeached yet.

That’s because “impeachment” under the Constitution means the House sending its approved articles of to the Senate, with House managers standing up in the Senate and saying the president is impeached.

As for the headlines we saw after the House vote saying, “TRUMP IMPEACHED,” those are a media shorthand, not a technically correct legal statement. So far, the House has voted to impeach (future tense) Trump. He isn’t impeached (past tense) until the articles go to the Senate and the House members deliver the message.

He goes on to say that once the articles are officially sent over to the Senate, then the Senate has an obligation under the constitution to have a trial.  But, and here’s the rub:

The provisions say nothing about timing. Taken literally, they don’t directly say that articles of impeachment passed by the House must be sent to the Senate. But the framers’ definition of impeachment assumed that impeachment was a process, not just a House vote.

And he spells it out even further:

A president who has been genuinely impeached must constitutionally have the opportunity to defend himself before the Senate. That’s built into the constitutional logic of impeachment, which demands a trial before removal.

To be sure, if the House just never sends its articles of impeachment to the Senate, there can be no trial there. That’s what the “sole power to impeach” means.

But if the House never sends the articles, then Trump could say with strong justification that he was never actually impeached. And that’s probably not the message Congressional Democrats are hoping to send.

Anyway, Trump hasn’t really been impeached yet, according to Cumberbatch.

This is gonna get reeeeeeally interesting.