Media in a frenzy over push for President Trump's impeachment
Reaction from Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and The Hill media reporter Joe Concha.
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says impeachment "isn't constitutionally permissible," and members of the liberal media should stop calling for Democrats to impeach President Trump.
"I stand up for civil liberties no matter who the president is," Dershowitz, a Democrat who endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's candidacy for president in 2008, said Wednesday night on "Hannity."
"If Hillary Clinton had been elected president and they were trying to impeach her, I would've written a book called 'The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton.' Congress can't impeach President Trump. The Constitution provides criteria for impeachment; treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in recent weeks has tried to tamp down members of her party clamoring to impeach the president over the Russia investigation, to little avail.
The Hill media reporter Joe Concha said Democrats calling for impeachment, such as South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-highest-ranking Democrat in the House, have not been "aligned with the American people."
Concha cited a Quinnipiac poll Wednesday that stated only one-third of Americans thought Congress should launch impeachment proceedings against President Trump. He cited the tense confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh ahead of his appointment to the Supreme Court.
"Remember the Kavanaugh hearings and what that did from a ratings perspective across the board. It would be like a steroid shot for these networks that are struggling right now post Mueller report because they're not trusted and there's fatigue around these sorts of things," Concha said on "Hannity."
The same Quinnipiac poll also showed that 69 percent of American voters believed any sitting president should be subject to criminal charges, while 24 percent said a president should be charged with crimes after he or she leaves office.
"I want to make sure every American, conservative, liberal, centrist, right, or left supports the Constitution and supports civil liberties no matter who the target is because today it's a Republican, tomorrow it can be a Democrat, the day after tomorrow it can be you," Dershowitz cautioned. "Preserve your constitutional rights and civil liberties and don't let politics interfere with civil liberties and constitutional law."
Concha also pointed to what he called a double standard in media coverage of the 2020 elections, calling out NBC's host Rachel Maddow, one of five moderators picked by the network for an upcoming presidential primary debate.
"Objective people look at her moderating a debate and saying, wait a minute, that can't happen, because in 2016 she moderated a debate and went up on stage on national television and hugged Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on stage," Concha said.
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He compared it to the perception of certain Fox News journalists. "Picture Shannon Bream or Martha MacCallum doing that to a Republican candidate. The apocalypse would look like nothing compared to what the reaction would be."
Dershowitz urged the media to put party politics aside and "get back to Walter Cronkite-type journalism where people can trust what they hear in the media. Today that's just not the case," he said.
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