www.nysun.com/editorials/impeachment-a-runaway-house/90989/
Judge Kenneth Starr’s speech today in defense of President Trump will go down in history as one of the great pleadings ever delivered before the Senate. He called on the solons to rebuff the charges of a “runaway house.” He called for an end to the era of eager impeachment. Generations from now, law professors will teach it to their students. It will endure as a masterpiece of constitutional law and wisdom.
We confess that we were skeptical when news hit the wires that Judge Starr would appear on the President’s behalf. The judge, after all, had been the independent counsel who pursued President Clinton to a failed impeachment. We had long opposed the very idea of an independent counsel as an affront to a central construct of our liberty, separated powers. He had ignored the warnings of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Yet today, Judge Starr dealt with all that in an honest and courageous way. He began with a point on which we had failed to reflect. The Constitution may, as it does, require that the senators, when sitting as a court of impeachment, be placed under oath. The oath is to do impartial justice. The Constitution, though, fails to require such an oath of the House, even when it is enacting articles of impeachment.