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Narrow and Deep or Broad and Shallow?

Steve Russell
7 min readDec 14, 2019

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Moscow Mitch McConnell, Foreman of the Jury. Official Senate Photo in public domain.

The Foreman of the jury is working with the defendant and admits it!

If the Democrats could prove a crime, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee howled in unison, they would have charged a crime. That’s not exactly why the Democratic leadership chose narrow and deep after being dragged kicking and screaming into an impeachment in which they expect no political profit. They chose to dumb it down so voters will understand why the survival of the Constitution is at stake.

My problem with selling the Constitution the way you would sell a box of soap is that the process shakes my confidence that people will understand why the document is so valuable. I read history and history tells me the document has served us well. Is it asking too much of my fellow citizens to expect them to develop an informed opinion on something so critical? I hope not.

Impeachment is a strange animal that lives in a terra nullius between politics and law. Moreover, if it is law, procedure is not exactly criminal and not exactly civil but rather something cobbled together each time from elements of both and Robert’s Rules of Order — just one more reason why every impeachment is sui generis.

When the articles of impeachment arrive in the Senate, it appears that the most robust authority…

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Steve Russell
Steve Russell

Written by Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)

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