A op-ed mais polémica da semana

Noah Feldman, Professor de Direito Constitucional e Direito Internacional na Harvard Law School, defende na BloombergView que, se o Presidente Trump acusou Barack Obama de colocar escutas nos telefones do candidato Trump e se não há provas que suportem a acusação e esta é falsa, este comportamento deveria dar origem a um processo de impeachment do Presidente Trump:

"The answer is that the constitutional remedy for presidential misconduct is impeachment.

That would have been the correct remedy if Obama had “ordered” a wiretap of the Republican presidential candidate’s phones. The president has no such legal authority. Only a court can order a domestic wiretap, and that only after a showing of probable cause by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Breaking the law by tapping Trump’s phones would have been an abuse of executive power that implicated the democratic process itself. Impeachment is the remedy for such a serious abuse of the executive office.

That includes abuse of office in the form of serious accusations against political opponents if they turn out to be false and made without evidence. These, too, deform the democratic process.

[...]

What’s more, government acts that distort and undercut the democratic process are especially serious and worthy of impeachment. The Watergate break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters was part of an effort to steal the 1972 election. A wiretap of Trump’s campaign would’ve had political implications.

And accusing the past Democratic president of an impeachable offense is every bit as harmful to democracy, assuming it isn’t true. Obama is the best-known and most popular Democrat in the country. The effect of attacking him isn’t just to weaken him personally, but to weaken the political opposition to Trump’s administration.

Given how great the executive’s power is, accusations by the president can’t be treated asymmetrically. If the alleged action would be impeachable if true, so must be the allegation if false. Anything else would give the president the power to distort democracy by calling his opponents criminals without ever having to prove it."

Fonte: Noah Feldman, Bloomberg