Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee this week trotted out a trio of supposedly dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of President Trump was justified.
But however smart scholars such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t above peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s behavior was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” we no longer had any obligation to take him seriously on the topic.
History began before 2016, and there are at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse” than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.
Let’s ignore for a moment that American presidents have owned their fellow human beings and focus instead on the fact that in 1942, the president of the United States signed an executive order to unilaterally intern some 120,000 Japanese-Americans. Not only was the policy racist, it amounted to a full-bore attack on about half the Constitution he had sworn to uphold.
Woodrow Wilson — who regularly said things like, “a negro’s place is in the corn field” — re-segregated the civil service, personally firing more than a dozen supervisors for the sin of being black. He also threw dissenters and political adversaries into prison, instructed the postmaster to refuse delivery of literature he deemed unpatriotic and created an unconstitutional civilian police force that targeted Americans for political dissent. All of what Wilson did was “worse.”