That was a right pretty speech, sir. But I ask you, what is a contract?

I had the distinctly unpleasant experience this morning of being informed that, in their reply brief to the House managers’ case for conviction in the Senate, Donald Trump’s lawyers had cited me for the proposition that it was wrong to impeach Trump for exercising his “free speech rights.”

The context here is that last year I published an article entitled “A Constitution for the Age of Demagogues: Using the 25th Amendment to Remove an Unfit President,” which I probably should have instead titled “Donald Trump Is the Worst Person in the History of the World, and We Should Kick Him Out of Office Via Every Possible Constitutional Mechanism,” just to avoid any possible misunderstandings.

The passage from the article Trump’s lawyers reference is arguing that, in American historical legal practice, impeachment has been construed relatively narrowly to cover criminal and quasi-criminal — or at least seriously corrupt — behavior, rather than even gross instances of official incompetence, aka “maladministration” in the traditional English legal jargon, which did count in Merrie Olde Englande as a high crime and/or misdemeanor for which an official could be impeached and removed.

I go onto argue that, leaving aside the copious traditional grounds for impeaching Trump, the 25th amendment should be construed broadly to remove him for gross unfitness for office, because we need that kind of constitutional mechanism, and furthermore the framers of the amendment intentionally left its language broad, to allow for expansive potential readings in unforeseen emergency situations.

Of course Trump’s actions on January 6th were at the absolute core of the traditional criminal/quasi-criminal/deeply corrupt grounds for impeachment, so to put it mildly my argument that we can and should use the 25th amendment to deal with situations of radical unfitness for office that don’t fall under the rubric of traditionally impeachable behavior is totally irrelevant to the present situation.

It takes quite a bit of chutzpah to cite an article I published last year that argues Trump is such a uniquely terrible president that we should use the 25th amendment to get rid of him, for the proposition that his actions on January 6th of this year shouldn’t be considered impeachable. But I guess when it comes to legal talent you get what you don’t pay for.