Im pleased to welcome Laurence Tribe and joshua matz. The carl m. Loeb University Professor and professor of constitutional law at harvard. Matz is a constitutional lawyer. Previously he and tribe have cowritten uncertain justice, the Roberts Court and the constitution. In their new book to end a presidency, they address one of todays most urgent questions, when and how to remove a president from office . Although the constitution gives congress the power to impeach, the matter is not as simple as a vote on whether or not the president is a national menace. Ultimately impeachment is a long, trying process that calls for political judgment of the highest order. Whether you think impeachment is necessary or a partisan conspiracy, to end a presidency is for anyone who wishes to understand how this immense power should be deployed. A reviewer writes, impeachment is a fearsome power, this bracing restrained and fiercely judicious account of the processes, origins and purpose explains why no u. S. President has ever been removed from office by impeachment, and what it might mean if one were. Now please join me in welcoming Laurence Tribe and joshua matz. applause thanks, very much. Can you hear me . Thank you so much, and thank you all for being here. I really appreciate politics and prose giving us this platform, and im eternly grateful to my coauthor joshua, who is a wonderful colleague and working through some of these deep problems. He was probably my favorite student since barack obama, and that is saying a lot. We work well together, and we have different cohort perspectives. I want to talk a little bit autobiographically how i came to the subject of impeachment. It will give you a gloss on the book and where it comes from inside of me. I was never taught anything about impeachment and constitutional law. Wasnt part of a curriculum. We were studying mostly the dormant Commerce Clause and occasionally some First Amendment law, but since i was about joshuas age, that is, since 1974, during the watergate scandal that brought down richard nixon, i obviously started thinking very seriously about impeachment and what it was all about. To a newly tenured law professor at harvard, impeachment looked, at the time, like a rather practical way to preserve the nation. By pulling down a crooked president , preventing him from wrecking our constitution, by ignoring the rule of law and using executive agencies like the fbi and the cia and private thugs to boot, in order to hurt his political opponent. That seemed like an astonishing threat to the rule of law and to our system of government. Little did any of us imagine we would see much of same thing but with the hostile foreign power as the colluding entity in achieving president ial authority. I spent the four or five years after the watergate scandal studying the whole constitution and writing about it as a whole. Looking at things that seemed rather marginal at the time except maybe for the impeachment clause, which had its day in the nixon era, the emoluments clause was interesting, never thought it would come in handy, you never know what will be relevant in the constitution and indeed my approach to the constitution and the approach really of this book is to see the constitution as a whole, as an integrative structure, not simply as a series of discreet points and powers and rights and responsibilities, and thats why, as we wrote about impeachment and studied it, we thought about how it would fit into the system of government, what might happen to make the presidency too weak . If for example, we followed the path that some countries had followed of making anything that might be as vague as mal administration or misbehavior or misconduct, a basis for removing a president , from american states as a way of removing their executive authority, massachusetts, new jersey, pennsylvania, and a smattering countries abroad. Nigeria, palau, sierra leone, russia. We would have a very different system, it could have been almost like a vote of no confidence. If on the other hand, we approach things the way argentina or germany or india or south africa or poland did, we would have been a very different kind of country as well. They basically say that anything that is a crime or that is unconstitutional violates the basic contract that keeps the chief executive in power. If we had that, then how often would a court dare to hold a particular president ial app like the travel ban or something unconstitutional if they knew it would immediately bring down the president . There are a lot of things the president can do that are consistent with our system of government, directing that anyone who beats up a black person or a muslim would automatically be pardoned and not subject to prosecution. Thats not a crime. But its truly impeachable, and then there are a lot of crimes that arent impeachable. Tax fraud. Tax evasion. So we had to formulate and we took our guidance from what the framers themselves thought and did in developing this living constitution. We had to formulate an approach, what is or is not impeachable . Its pretty clear that not every instance of perjury should be impeachable. I concluded that when clintons lying under oath about sex with an intern was treated as a way of bringing him down, but that charge on which he was impeached was one that got only 55 votes in the senate to convict. 45 voted to acquit. 55 was not enough. You need 67. The other charge against clinton, obstruction of justice, which was a repackaged version of the perjury charge, came out 5050. Clinton emerged triumphant. His popularity soared. That gave us a clue to what some of dangers of impeaching prematurely or too soon are. Somebody can be the most terrible demagogic liar, he can melt the fabric of our society, but if it doesnt look like attacking his position through a bill of impeachment will result in anything more than a claim that hes been vindicated, you see, i told you, no obstruction, no collusion, vindicated and then empowered to do even more horrible things, then you have to think twice about whether impeachment makes sense. And joshua is going to talk about some of the other factors that make even a successful impeachment, if by that we mean an impeachment that results in forced resignation as with nixon or actual conviction which weve never done. Some of the factors that make a fully successful impeachment extremely convulsive for the country. That if the factors that allowed someone like trump to be elected president in the first place are things that wont go away, impeachment is not a magic wand, weve been amazed by how many people send us emails or tweets, cant wait for your book because it will remove gorsuch from the court. President is illegitimate, get rid of him, and everything hes done is unwound. Thats kind of magic wand thinking. Theres a drug that you will find amusing to read about in the books which is supposed to make headaches go away, and make anxiety dissipate, that kind of magical thinking about the power of impeachment really doesnt do much good. But at the other extreme, apocalyptic thinking, if we succeed in removing a president who is favored by 40 of the people, if the offenses and the abuses of power that people discover in the course of investigation succeed in getting twothirds of the senate to remove him but millions of people still think hes legitimately there, that theyre being deprived of the voice that they believed this guy would give them, then the underpinnings of democracy might be shaken. We dont really want 60 million alienated people running around, some of them rather wellarmed. Stability of the country is a fragile thing, and in much of the book we explore what i spent decades thinking about but never examining as systematically as we did here, in much of the book we explore how to navigate the shoals of silla and caribdus, what can we do with an outofcontrol president . I was one of the people who thought even as early as midnight on tuesday november the i guess it was the 8th, 2016. Time was ripe to begin impeaching the fella. Because we talked a good bit about the importance of his not being simultaneously the owner of lots of companies that would be, if not bribed, at least greased by foreign powers in violation of i mentioned it earlier the emoluments clause. Its not just a technical provision, one of the things the framers most feared was foreign influence over our president. One of the things they most feared was the fact that we couldnt necessarily tell when that influence had yielded fruit. Do we know why the president was so slow in enforcing the magniski sanctions, we suspect there is a connection between that and help from putin getting elected, and a book published by james clapper, facts and fears, may well prove decisive. Clapper concludes, hes a former cautious intelligence guy who served under many president s as dni and other similar capacities conclude not only is our Intelligence Community had fully concluded that russia directed by putin deliberately sought to help trump get elected as well as to hurt hillary and as well as to destabilize the country. Not only that, but hes convinced, based on the fact that it was just 80,000 votes in wisconsin and michigan and pennsylvania that made all the difference in the Electoral College, that putin was a butfor cause of this presidency. Thats a rather powerful conclusion. Its one that is based more on hunch and common sense and experience than on any particular smoking gun, but unlike the smoking gun of the watergate tapes that nixon was finally ordered to turn over, there have been lots of smoking howitzers in plain view with this president. How do we react to those . Shortly after hes elected, evidence emerges that all of the characters were meeting constantly and lying about it with russian oligarchs and members of the government. You look at the way in which our policy toward a country like qatar moves back and forth and can you plot the curve and turns out the curve exactly follows how nice qatar is being to Jared Kushner and his dad with respect to helping bail them out of the huge debt they have on 666 fifth avenue. It is not simply that this guy is a kleptocrat, but the creptocracy that is directing the Foreign Policy of the united states. Thats disastrous, but doesnt immediately translate into the conclusion that we ought therefore to pull the impeachment cord and start that process rolling. I thought we should start with this investigation the day after he was elected. Certainly when he was inaugurated. When he fired comey, i thought the case was clear, that was open and shut corrupt interference with an ongoing investigation. It was certainly obstruction of justice, like one of the main impeachment charges against nixon. And so i wrote an oped in the Washington Post four days later calling for the immediate initiation of impeachment inquiry. I was nervous about how far and how fast people like tom steyer were going. They werent calling just for investigation. They were saying impeach now. As if there was a way to do that with a constructive outcome. Four day after i wrote that oped, rosenstein appointed special counsel mueller. That, for me, was a sign. Not that some guy on a white horse was going come riding in and make it all transparent and clear and convince the people who believe anything that trump says that what mueller has discovered is true. I never thought that. I always realized there would be things that trump could do to undermine the face of the American People in robert mueller, despite his integrity and how despite his support was when he was named. But it did seem to me that while that probe was going on, and its been extraordinarily productivity with guilty pleas and people cooperating and indictments, while the probe was going on, we should hold steady, that we shouldnt jump ahead, we should continue investigating, we have a chapter in our book that i think joshua will enjoy describing because its fun to write. I think it will be fun to read, about impeachment talk and how dangerous it can be to have too much of it, but its not dangerous to have too much impeachment thought, and impeachment reading and impeachment understanding. As the American People need to understand what this tool is, where it came from. When its not wise to use it. Why the problem is not simply one of thumbs up or thumbs down, hes committed an Impeachable Offense or hasnt, but what should the frame of reference be thinking about when it makes sense to use this extraordinary power . And we use the history of impeachment and the strange abuses of that power. Not only with respect to clinton, but there were people who wanted to impeach Thomas Jefferson because he was rather throw is appoint a new collector of the port of boston. Now i like boston, and i wish jefferson moved a little more quickly, and i wish he hasnt, you know, held onto so many slaves. All kinds of things. But policy differences and ambient badness does not make the case for impeachment. We talk also about how president tyler was impeached because of his hyperactive veto pen. That was a good example how impeachment should not be used. When you just disagree very often with the president , and when in fact, we present a general theory of how to approach impeachment, and i suppose you could call it the shoe on the other foot theory. That is if youre ready to remove a president and believe can you generate a powerful and deep bipartisan consensus, in circumstances where you come out the same way even if you felt the opposite way about the president , even if you love this president s policies, if you were ready to conclude that you would in that event still make the fateful move to try removing a president through this power, then youve passed the, you might call it, for fans who are fans of john rawls, the veil of ignorance test, not knowing which side of the political rubicon you stand on, you are ready to think this person is so dangerous to the persistence of the republic, that you really ought to go. And i think i probably ought to go. Ive been talking longer than i meant to, and i want very much to have you all hear from joshua, but im most especially want us to have time for q a. Thank you so much. applause im glad that larry spoke so much, it means ill only speak a little because we want to leave time for q a. One thing i should highlight is that much like the book itself, im not going to say much about president trump, apart from the we in writing the book came to at a particular moment in time, where we thought there was a president who was doing terrible things, that he was breaking the law, upsetting norms, that have brought the presidency into accord with the needs of constitutional democracy and destabilizing our position around the world, and it was clear there was going to be sustained impeachment pressure throughout trumps presidency. I think we can all agree that impeachment talk will be with us for many years to come, and so the question for us was a general question, when you have a president with whom you strongly disagree and you think are doing things bad for the society, under what circumstance do you reach for the big red button, where you break the glass and all sorts of bad potential consequences but worth it to save the society . When do you instead choose other means of engaging with the president , of constraining his abuses, of thwarting norm violations and trying to keep the ship of state afloat to the next president ial election. And so for us, the question was never impeach our nothing, it was impeach or what else . And when is impeachment really the right move . As we saw, it there are basically six questions that you have to ask and answer in order to make that decision, and it was those six questions that structured our book. And we ask them at a pretty high level of generality, though we provide tons of historical examples and support from constitutional law and do at times speak about trump. The very first question is to begin at the beginning, why is there an impeachment power . What were the framers trying to do when they included this process in the constitution . And start by talking about benjamin franklin, who at the Constitutional Convention got up and said if we dont provide a way to get rid of the president peacefully, they will assassinate him. As he saw it, World History was pretty clear on this, that the stories that the frameers knew of failed leaders was a tale of assassinations, coups, revelation and other sad endings for everyone involved and thought there had to be a way to break the cycle. For him this ancient english doctrine, fallen into disuse on the other side of the ocean but the colonists internalized as part of their legacy of English Common law and said we can remove the president when he abuses his power in a way that imminently threatens Society Without killing him, without generally destabilizing the country as a whole, and the question of when you can do that and who can you do that was to the framers intimately linked to the question of what will the checks and balances look like . You know the question of whos going to be the president was linked to the question who can remove the president and when and why, and there were concerns with creating a system where you could have an adventurous, creative, energetic president , who could flex muscle and use powers in ways that were not foreseen but who could be ejected. And that understanding of what they were trying to do ran throughout their thought process, and we talk about the framers not because we think their word is final. The constitution belongs to the living, but rather because in order to understand the impeachment power week think its vital to have a grip where it came from and what its role is in the broader constitutional scheme. And so in the first chapter we end by divining three impeachment lessons. The first is it was put in place to prevent abuses of executive power. The power vested in the presidency, but you have to give a fair bit of leeway, the constitution underspecifies what the powers of the president really are, and they have evolved in extraordinary ways across time. On the one hand you have to watch for abuse of power but need to measure that against evolving understanding against the president s role in american life. Second lesson we offer is that in general, partisanship should not play a role in impeachment, and impeachments motivated by partisan or personal animus have not only historically failed and been condemned, if one were to succeed, the longterm consequences could be quite dire because they would destabilize elections as something we use to define who is going to govern our society for period