Quote (ThatAlex @ Feb 2 2020 10:25pm)
I mean, a core of Dershowitz's argument was that the President was allowed to abuse their power.
That's fine, and it may not reach a high crime or misdemeanor, but we are seeing an even further expansion of executive power in real time.
And whether the Senate wanted to ultimate acquit or not, it would have at least been good optics for a separate branch of government to at least look like they wanted to check and balance the executive branch rather than go through the motions.
Historically, the expansion of executive power has come from the executive claiming they have a power through a novel theory and then exercising it unilaterally, leaving it up to congress to challenge it by legislation and/or in the courts.
I don't think it really sets a precedent for expanding executive powers when you invert that and have congress attempting to curtail an executive based on a novel theory and then failing to do so.
If the question was, can an executive hold up foreign aid at their discretion despite having no legal basis to do in legislation- then despite everything the GAO has said to the contrary, that precedent was set ages ago and every president has routinely ignored that limitation. That power of the executive wasn't expanded by Trump. If the question is whether a president can "abuse their power" unchecked, than that's not really a precedent at all because its such an intentionally vague term. And even on any specific understanding of the term, you still have the completely unresolved question of the *normal* two channels for the other two branches to challenge a president's powers: By legislation and/or in the courts. The democrats didn't sue Trump to force the foreign aid to go through. They didn't pass new (and redundant) legislation saying he can't withhold the aid. Instead they opted for impeachment without a high crime or misdemeanor.
So I don't think it can really constitute an expansion of executive power to say the president can't be impeached for doing something that the constitution really doesn't let him get impeached for, without trying to challenge whether he can be stopped from doing it by passing a law or an order from the judiciary. The entire history of expansion of executive powers in the US has come from the success, failure or declination of those recourses,
never from impeachment or its failure. At least unlike Nixon, Clinton or Trump, the issue of Andrew Johnson's impeachment actually was an allegation of executive overreach in policy alone. And even in that case, it boiled down to the supreme court declaring unconstitutional years later the acts they failed to impeach Johnson for- a check on the executive by the judiciary.
The checks and balances remain unchanged. The only precedent is that of impeachment normalized as a partisan farce to slap at a president of the opposite party as an empty threat purely for theatrics and optics.