It is entirely reasonable to ask whether this, in itself, is an impeachable offense. Jamal Greene, a professor at Columbia Law School, sparked discussion on Twitter as to whether Trump’s actions might fall afoul of the Constitution’s requirement that the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of … Bribery”—the pardon being the bribe offered. The legal scholar Charles Black, in his 1974 Impeachment: A Handbook, suggests that a president’s choice to pardon “all government police who kill anybody under any circumstances” would be impeachable insofar as it is “obviously wrong, in [itself], to any person of honor.”
The great irony is that, while the president’s words shift the country toward the edge of law and arguably bring him within the bounds of impeachment, at the same time they have no power at all. According to CNN, when Trump left the instructed after telling Border Patrol agents to disobey judge’s orders, the agents’ supervisors informed them not to follow the president’s instruction. When I read this I thought of my colleague Jim Baker’s point that the Department of Justice has come to routinely disregard what would seem to be binding legal determinations made by the president—for example, Trump’s tweets that what his former lawyer Michael Cohen did was not a crime. “What does [it] mean for the rule of law in the United States,” Baker asked, that officials so often ignore the president’s statements on matters of law?
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