Page:Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States — Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives.pdf/50

 There are at least as many ways to abuse power as there are powers vested in the President. It would thus be an exercise in futility to attempt a list of every conceivable abuse constituting "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." That said, abuse of power was no vague notion to the Framers and their contemporaries. It had a very particular meaning to them. Impeachable abuse of power can take two basic forms: (1) the exercise of official power in a way that, on its very face, grossly exceeds the President's constitutional authority or violates legal limits on that authority; and (2) the exercise of official power to obtain an improper personal benefit, while ignoring or injuring the national interest. In other words, the President may commit an impeachable abuse of power in two different ways: by engaging in forbidden acts, or by engaging in potentially permissible acts but for forbidden reasons (e.g., with the corrupt motive of obtaining a personal political benefit).

The first category involves conduct that is inherently and sharply inconsistent with the law— and that amounts to claims of monarchical prerogative. The generation that rebelled against King George III knew what absolute power looked like. The Framers had other ideas when they organized our government, and so they placed the chief executive within the bounds of law. That means the President may exercise only the powers expressly or impliedly vested in him by the Constitution, and he must also respect legal limits on the exercise of those powers (including the rights of Americans citizens). A President who refuses to abide these restrictions, thereby causing injury to society itself and engaging in recognizably wrongful conduct, may be subjected to impeachment for abuse of power.

That principle also covers conduct grossly inconsistent with and subversive of the separation of powers. The Framers knew that "[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, ... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." To protect liberty, they wrote a Constitution that creates a system of checks and balances within the federal government. Some of those rules are expressly enumerated in our founding charter; others are implied from its structure or from the history of inter-branch relations. When a President wields executive power in ways that usurp and destroy the prerogatives of Congress or the Judiciary, he exceeds the scope of his constitutional authority and violates limits on permissible conduct. Such abuses of power are therefore impeachable. That conclusion is further supported by the British origins of the phrase "high Crimes and Misdemeanors": Parliament repeatedly impeached ministers for "subvert[ing] its conception of proper constitutional order in favor of the 'arbitrary and tyrannical' government of ambitious monarchs and their grasping minions."

The Supreme Court advanced similar logic in Ex Parte Grossman, which held the President can pardon officials who defy judicial orders and are held in criminal contempt of court. This holding raised an obvious concern: what if the President used "successive pardons" to "deprive a court of power