Laurence Tribe

Some people believe so fervently in the dogmas of free-market capitalism that they would rather rip hungry children away from their families than re-evaluate the tenets of their secular religion. ...For what it's worth, Laurence Tribe — the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School — argued that policies like the one initially threatened by Wyoming Valley West are almost certainly illegal. "This public school policy is outrageous and almost certainly unconstitutional," Tribe told Salon by email. "Threatening to take children away from their parents because their parents fail to pay for particular items supplied by the school violates both due process and the substantive rights of parents to bring up their own children. It also deprives people of the equal protection of the laws in violation of the 14th Amendment. I cannot imagine such a policy surviving judicial attack."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: We are eye witnesses to the unraveling of the American project. Watching the old war hero stumble on the stage of history as he tried valiantly to overcome the limitations that his obviously ailing condition imposed on him was painful in itself. Watching the pitiless Republican vultures pick at his bones was even more so. But watching the ugly truth of what our nation threatens to become was worst of all.  That we are governed by a president who seized the office and wields its weaponry with the deliberate and felonious help of a hostile foreign power is now beyond denying.

When John Elwood argued before the U.S. Supreme Court as assistant to the solicitor general in the early 2000s, one gentle, cordial query always made his stomach clench. "May I just ask...," Justice John Paul Stevens would say, or, "Can I ask you a question?" Elwood admits he sometimes thought, "I wish you wouldn't." The polite question was invariably the wind-up to an inquiry that "really cut to the heart of the matter, and zeroed in on the weakest part of your case," said Elwood, who is now a partner at Arnold & Porter. "His mannerism was gentle, and the questions he asked were always fair ones." ... Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who has argued before the Supreme Court many times, said that style set Justice Stevens apart from his colleagues, who "obviously felt entitled simply to cut off an advocate in mid-sentence or even mid-word." "Justice Stevens was unfailingly courteous and kind, not just with his colleagues and his law clerks, but with counsel arguing at the court in front of him," he told Law360 in an email.

President Donald Trump this week claimed he won an emoluments case brought against him after a federal appeals court dismissed the lawsuit. A Harvard law professor and constitutional expert says that's "bullshit." ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe fired back at Trump, noting that the president didn't win the lawsuit at all. "It's all bullshit, of course. He didn't 'win'," tweeted Tribe, explaining that the appellate panel had merely ruled that D.C. and Maryland lacked standing to bring the action. "[A]nd he's still using the Oval Office to rob us blind and fill his coffers with piles of rubles that put him in debt to our adversaries," Tribe continued.

President Trump has struck out in the courts on his effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling essentially called out Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for giving a false excuse for including the question.  ...Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe reiterates, “In my view, the president does not have either inherent or statutory authority to add the citizenship question by unilateral executive action. Article I of the Constitution — both textually and historically as well as structurally — manifestly assigns census matters to Congress.” He adds, “The 14th Amendment doesn’t alter that assignment but reinforces it. Article II does not give the president any role in this area beyond whatever role Congress delegates to him.” He concludes that Trump could not “could succeed along this path in getting the existing district court injunctions lifted.” Moreover, the existing ruling from the federal courts — preventing the inclusion of the census question — remain in effect.

A letter to the editor by 19 Boston area faculty members, including Laurence Tribe, Dehlia Umunna, and David Harris.  WE ARE 19 FACULTY MEMBERS at universities across the Boston area, including Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University, and Northeastern University. We wish to respond to The Boston Globe’s recent article, “Stopping injustice or putting the public at risk? Suffolk DA Rachael Rollins’s tactics spur pushback,” which contained reporting that appears to us to be, at best, seriously misleading.

“The Justice Department is swapping out the lawyers who had been representing the administration in its legal battle to put a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census, possibly signaling career attorneys’ legal or ethical concerns over the latest maneuvering ordered by President Trump." Even more extraordinary, a Justice Department official "said the entire team on the case — both those in political positions and career employees who have served multiple administrations — will be replaced with political and career lawyers from the department’s Civil Division and Consumer Protection Branch.” ...Not to put too fine a point on it, but what these lawyers do will have profound consequences for the country and their careers. Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe warns, “The Department of Justice cannot avoid the long-term credibility cost to its litigating posture of contradicting itself in successive filings simply by changing the names of the career DOJ lawyers on the pleadings or by bringing new faces into court. If that’s the aspiration, it’s not going to succeed.”

President Trump said Thursday that he is seeking to delay the constitutionally mandated census to give administration officials time to come up with a better explanation for why it should include a citizenship question. Trump’s announcement, in tweets sent from Japan, came hours after the Supreme Court put on hold his administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, saying it had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting the information. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said Trump did not appear to be suggesting a marginal adjustment of the census schedule for purposes of litigation but rather was trying try to mold the process to his needs. Tribe called it an indication of “the administration’s contempt of the rule of law.” “The combination of the president’s abject ignorance and manipulative flexibility on these matters is, at a minimum, quite telling,” Tribe said. “It suggests all matters — constitutional and legal — are subject to his whim.”

Rejecting a request from President Trump, a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday cleared the way for nearly 200 Democrats in Congress to continue their lawsuit against him alleging that his private business violates an anti-corruption provision of the Constitution. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe expressed delight upon hearing of the ruling: “That is splendid news for the Emoluments Clause cases — and for the rule of law.” He added, “Today’s ruling confirms that the Trump strategy of denying, delaying, deflecting, and dissembling while continuing to defy the Constitution has all but run its course and that the chickens are finally coming home to roost.”

President Trump said Thursday that he is seeking to delay the constitutionally mandated census to give administration officials time to come up with a better explanation for why it should include a citizenship question. ...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said that Trump did not appear to be suggesting a marginal adjustment of the census schedule for purposes of litigation but rather was trying try to mold the process to his needs. He called it an indication of “the administration’s contempt of the rule of law.” “The combination of the president’s abject ignorance and manipulative flexibility on these matters is, at a minimum, quite telling,” Tribe said. “It suggests all matters — constitutional and legal — are subject to his whim.”

IIt is somewhere on the outer edges of conceivable that a sitting president will refuse to step down if he loses his re-election campaign. Nothing close to that has ever happened before. If that scenario plays out, America could still be saved from tyranny — but our democratic institutions would need to rise to the challenge. ..."There is no precedent for any such thing, any more than there is a precedent for the Trump presidency," Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "Exactly what would happen is hard to guess. At a minimum, we would be in a time of extraordinary danger and chaos. The very fact that one has to imagine a circumstance in which a president refuses to leave office after being lawfully defeated is more than enough to remind us of the existential danger posed by the current occupant of the Oval Office. ..."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is letting President Donald Trump know he can "get away with murder" by refusing to open an impeachment inquiry on him, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University opined Wednesday. Constitutional law scholar and Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe admitted he is a lifelong Pelosi fan but agreed with George Conway, husband of Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, who criticized the House speaker for her continued stance against impeaching Trump. ... Tribe elaborated to Newsweek on Wednesday afternoon that George Conway is right and Pelosi is wrong "because both the Constitution and common sense tell us you don't refuse to convene a formal process to investigate a serious crime just because it looks like the criminal has the jurors in his hip pocket."

In an interview with NPR, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) opined that if the facts warrant it, President Trump should be indicted for crimes outlined in Robert S. Mueller III’s report: "There has to be accountability," Harris added. "I mean look, people might, you know, question why I became a prosecutor. Well, I'll tell you one of the reasons — I believe there should be accountability. Everyone should be held accountable, and the president is not above the law." ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe agrees that another look at the OLC memo is needed. “The 2000 OLC memo, which basically echoed the 1973 OLC memo and its reasoning, should certainly be revisited by whatever presidential administration succeeds the one now in power. To begin with, the OLC memo was analytically flawed from the start and rested on a theory fundamentally incompatible with the core constitutional premise that nobody, and certainly no president, is above the law.”

President Trump has threatened to take legal action if Democrats try to impeach him, musing that he’ll “sue.” He has peppered confidants and advisers with questions about how an impeachment inquiry might unfold. And he has coined his own cheeky term — “the I-word” — to refer to the legal and political morass that threatens to overshadow his presidency as he heads into his 2020 reelection campaign. ... Trump’s assertions that he would sue to prevent impeachment have prompted some criticism in the legal community, with Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who has called for Trump’s impeachment, describing the idea as “idiocy” in a tweet. “Not even a SCOTUS filled with Trump appointees would get in the way of the House or Senate,” Tribe wrote.

Just hours before a panel of prosecutors and former Watergate figure John Dean was set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, its chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), announced that a deal had been struck to make available the “most important” underlying materials that were the basis for report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. ... Third, strong supporters of impeachment have put out a false narrative that casts the House as relatively helpless. Far from it. The House can get relief in the courts. Moreover, it seems Barr thinks that being held in contempt of Congress is enough of a threat to pry loose at least some evidence. “At least at first glance, this is a very promising development. It strongly suggests that even Bill Bar has his limits in terms of facing down a threat of being held in contempt by the House of Representatives,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe. “This is incremental movement, and the pace is glacial, but the glass, though far from half full, no longer seems entirely empty.”

A real estate firm owned in part by Jared Kushner reportedly received $90 million in foreign funding from "an opaque offshore vehicle" after the son-in-law of President Donald Trump began working as a senior adviser at the White House. ... "The conflicts that have swirled around Jared Kushner have only grown more distressing with time," Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email. "Besides being the president’s son-in-law, he is a scion of a family, whose wealth is intertwined with Jared’s many roles in the Trump administration, roles that have put him virtually in bed with, among other bloody despots, Saudi Crown Prince MBS, with whom Jared hobnobbed right after MBS sent a team of thugs to brutally torture, murder and dismember a Washington Post critic of the Saudi regime. It would take a long time to enumerate the conflicts we know about. Those we don’t yet know about are neatly hidden away in the Cadre company, in which Kushner apparently has holdings valued at as much as $50 million."

In the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s public statement that he was not confident President Donald Trump did not commit a crime, calls for impeachment have grown increasingly louder. ... Trump’s contention that the courts would bar Congress from impeaching him garnered a great deal of backlash in the press and amongst legal scholars, many of whom pointed out that the courts do not play a role in the impeachment process. Harvard law professor emeritus and frequent Trump defender Alan Dershowitz, however, penned an op-ed for The Hill on Friday arguing that the Supreme Court could, indeed, overrule the impeachment. ... Laurence Tribe, a renowned constitutional law professor at Harvard who recently authored the book To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, previously told Time that Trump’s suggestion about judicial intervention was “idiocy,” adding that the Supreme Court is “very good at slapping down attempts to drag things out by bringing it into a dispute where it has no jurisdiction.”

On All In, Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe walks through his proposal on how to impeach Donald Trump by avoiding Mitch McConnell.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: It is possible to argue that impeaching President Trump and removing him from office before the 2020 election would be unwise, even if he did cheat his way into office, and even if he is abusing the powers of that office to enrich himself, cover up his crimes and leave our national security vulnerable to repeated foreign attacks. Those who make this argument rest their case either on the proposition that impeachment would be dangerously divisive in a nation as politically broken as ours, or on the notion that it would be undemocratic to get rid of a president whose flaws were obvious before he was elected. Rightly or wrongly — I think rightly — much of the House Democratic caucus, at least one Republican member of that chamber (Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan) and more than a third of the nation’s voters disagree. They treat the impeachment power as a vital constitutional safeguard against a potentially dangerous and fundamentally tyrannical president and view it as a power that would be all but ripped out of the Constitution if it were deemed unavailable against even this president. That is my view, as well.

Everything you ever wanted to know about impeachment(but were too afraid to ask) with Harvard Law School Professor and author of To End a Presidency, Laurence Tribe. Plus a powerhouse panel featuring Politico’s Marc Caputo and Michael Grunwald, and MSNBC legal whiz Katie Phang.

Donald Trump could be impeached in the House but not tried in the Senate for the sole purpose of presidential censure, Harvard professor of constitutional law Laurence Tribe tells AM JOY with Joy Reid.