Legal experts took President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to task on Thursday after he suggested the Supreme Court should rule Trump’s impeachment over the Ukraine scandal as “unconstitutional.”
The former New York mayor argued on Twitter that such a move would “prevent a precedent from forming which would allow the House to overstep its bounds and impeach for policy differences or political leverage.”
“If this impeachment is not declared illegal it would remove the constitutional limitation of crimes on the power to impeach,” Giuliani continued. “It would allow the House to impeach for policy differences or political leverage.”
But his case was swiftly shot down.
Josh Chafetz, a Cornell law professor and expert on impeachment, described Giuliani’s argument as “some quality gibberish.”
“I honestly don’t know whether it would be worse if he believed this was the sort of thing that might happen, or if he was just cynically making it up for ... I dunno, reasons,” Chafetz responded, also challenging Giuliani to “file whatever sort of paperwork you think would be necessary to put this process in motion.”
Neal Katyal, a former acting U.S. solicitor general who as a private lawyer frequently argues cases in the Supreme Court, described Giuliani’s tweet as “just about as good of a legal argument as everything else” he says.
Former federal prosecutors Renato Mariotti and Elie Honig also chimed in:
As did University of Iowa law professor Andy Grewal, who responded with a simple “lol.”
Others also dismantled Giuliani’s rationale: