Mike Braun Quotes
If the Senate impeachment trial were a real court, all 100 senators would be removed as jurors for bias for or against the president.
Braun, Mike. "Sen. Mike Braun: Impeachment Trial Is Politics, Not a Court of Law." The Indianapolis Star, 22 Jan. 2020.
The debate was about the unlimited pardon power of the President. Madison argued that the check was the impeachment power. However, Presidents had tended to make large numbers of pardons just before they leave office so the impeachment power works only as a check for the beginning and middle part of their term.
Livingston could not stop the process, which had built up a momentum of its own among most Republicans. The debate went on, and, despite public opinion favoring the President, on a highly partisan party line vote Clinton was impeached by the house. The impeachment, only the second in U. S. history, then failed in the Senate.
This is the earliest surviving attempt of the Romans to formulate a legal code.
The issue had first arisen during the Watergate Scandal, where there was concern that if the House held impeachment hearings of President Nixon, he might refuse to provide documents or order others in the Executive Branch not to testify. In this hearing, they were discussing the possible impeachment of President George W. Bush.
From time to time, the assessment of a prospective Supreme Court justice has depended on an attempt to move the court in a particular direction or to prevent that. This is as opposed to the issue of the competence of the nominee. In most cases, such nominees may not have been the best qualified but they have been extremely competent. In a few cases, such as that of Justice Clarence Thomas, the justice was mediocre and inexperienced at best, but his virtues were his race and his total ideological consistency. Most attorneys can predict his vote in advance. He has never asked a question in oral arguments. See {623452} .
This was America’s first Presidential impeachment which occurred just a few years after America’s greatest crisis—the Civil War. It was handled in an orderly, serious manner following the law throughout.
Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
Hamilton pointed out that there is always a philosophical conflict between impeachment of an elected official and the right of the people to choose their own representatives. Both have very important and noble reasons supporting them. The founding fathers compromised by allowing impeachment, but making it very difficult.
In his boisterous dissent he read from the bench in the EPA v. EME Homer City case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, made a mistake and in citing a previous opinion he had written, he made an error recalling what he had written previously. Critics of the justice not only castigated him but made fun of his seemingly foolish error that a law student should not make. Whalen’s quotation is important because it illustrated the highly partisan tone in American politics at that. Whalen, a partisan conservative explains how he would do the same thing if a liberal judge made a mistake. The error was corrected in the final published version of the opinion, and it did not affect the logic of the dissent or even the factual arguments for the dissent. Yet the quest for partisan advantage and trashing a political opponent was so in vogue that a minor mistake was treated as a major political scandal. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st were not the most partisan and nasty era of American politics but it was one of the worst.
Judges are restrained by the law and precedence (stare decisis), as well as having to uphold what he/she thinks are undesirable laws or find against laws he thinks are good. He must decide on the law and the facts of the particular case. And if he is an appellate or a Supreme Court judge he must make compromises to accommodate other justices hearing the case along with him/her.
Michael K. Braun is an American businessman and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Indiana. Previously, he represented the 63rd district in the Indiana House of Representatives from 2014 to 2017. A member of the Republican Party, Braun was elected to the United States Senate in 2018, defeating Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly.
