Larry Allen Brown

If the president is immune to indictment, then the Constitution no longer has any meaning

The issue of indicting a sitting president now comes into focus. A sitting president must be able to be indicted, because otherwise he could get away with murder. Literally.

The argument made from those like Rudy Giuliani is that the president must be impeached first, and then when he's no longer in office, you can indict him. But that leaves a gaping hole in the process that the framers of the Constitution would never have agreed with. When the Constitution was ratified, we didn't have political parties. The framers opposed them.

George Washington specifically opposed them. As he wrote in his farewell address in 1796: “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

The framers didn't envision that party loyalty would ever become so tribal as to block any effort to remove a president for high crimes and misdemeanors. Surely, they thought, honorable men will do the honorable thing.

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The People’s Congress

Town Meeting is America’s oldest, proudest, and most fundamentally democratic institution, but with the loss of local control over issues comes a decline in local participation

What is a Town Meeting, anyway? One thing is for sure. It is not what most Americans (and many Vermonters) think it is. For decades, our representatives in Washington have come home to hold “town meetings” on this or that public issue - often, shameless testimonies to their own...

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