Thus Schiff can’t be arrested and “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason” because of what he “read … aloud to Congress” because he can’t be “questioned in any other place” for “any speech or debate in either House.” Trump’s tweet so precisely contradicts the Speech or Debate Clause it’s almost as if he looked it up and demanded the opposite.
And that’s how, as political scientist Jacob Levy has proposed, “Trump’s tweet is by itself arguably impeachable.” The Speech or Debate Clause is “not ambiguous as to its meaning, history, or intent,” Levy contends, and Trump’s contravention of it seems equally unambiguous.
Levy isn’t the only one who thinks so. “A president of the United States accusing a member of Congress of treason is literally unconstitutional and presumptively impeachable,” says his fellow political scientist, Paul Musgrave. “The [Speech and Debate] clause is specifically there to protect members of Congress from groundless prosecution by the executive for speech that the executive does not like,” writes Dylan Matthews at Vox. “In other words, it exists for exactly this situation, to protect the Adam Schiffs of the world against the Donald Trumps of the world.” (Legal experts have also raised the clause in connection to previous Trumpian efforts to impede congressional oversight.)
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