SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
impeach trump
Why Aren't the Lawyers and Bar Associations Screaming From the Rooftops for Trump's Impeachment?
Trump is a shameless, arrogant bloviator who is self-indicting daily. As trained attorneys trained in the Constitution and rule of law, his ouster is our sworn duty.
Jan 24, 2026
As Trump’s violent dictatorial grip over America worsens, his violations of our Constitution, federal laws, and international treaties become more brazen. Only the organized people can stop this assault on our democracy by firing him through impeachment, the power exclusively accorded to Congress by our Founders. This is one of the few things that Trump cannot control. According to a PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) poll, “A majority of Americans (56%) agree that ‘President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,’ up from 52% in March 2025.” Trump’s recent actions will only further increase this number.
In earlier columns, I discussed the potential power of 1) The Contented Classes; 2) The small minority of progressive billionaires; and 3) The huge potential of the four ex-presidents – George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who detest Trump but are mostly silent, and are not organizing their tens of millions of voters angry about Dictator Donald’s attack on the rule of law.
A fourth formidable constituency, if organized, is retired military officers who have their own reasons for dumping Trump. Start with the ex-generals whom Trump named as Secretary of Defense (James Mattis), John Kelly, as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, and Mark Milley, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A fifth constituency is the legal profession, and their bar associations at the national, state, and local levels. There are over one million Attorneys in the U.S. who, when they are admitted to the state bars to practice law, are designated as “officers of the court.” This status makes them quasi-official persons with a monopoly to represent clients in courts of law.
Bruce Fein and others have called on licensed attorneys to become “our first responders” to violations of the rule of law, especially by government entities.
So, what have they done? A tiny minority are bravely on the legal ramparts representing clients victimized by Trump and winning many cases at the federal district court level, only to be often stalled by the circuit courts of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court.
As far as the bar associations are concerned, during Trump’s first term of serial lawless actions (he said in 2019, “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as president”), they were largely silent and AWOL. Bruce Fein and I sent two letters to all 50 state bar associations calling for them to stand up for the rule of law over Trump’s regime. Not one responded to our letters. (See Letter to Bar Associations, February 14, 2025).
We informed these bar associations and the American Bar Association (ABA) of the courageous “white papers” issued in 2005-2006 by three task forces brought together under then ABA President Michael Greco. They charged the Bush/Cheney regime with three impeachable offenses. The task forces had liberal and conservative lawyers working together on these statements. (See the ABA White Papers).
Greco’s successor to the one-year presidency of the ABA told him she was not going to extend the ABA’s watchdog project on the lawless presidency. This abdication has continued to this day, with one exception. Both the ABA and many state/local bar associations took a collective position in March 2025 against Trump’s punishing law firms for representing disfavored clients. They called his “lawlessness” an attempt to “remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.”
In June, the ABA punctuated this charge with a federal lawsuit against the Trump regime. (Pending).
Going beyond protection “of the guild,” the New York City Bar Association released a report in late 2025 that called out the Trump Administration’s “ongoing abuse of presidential power and a grave breach of the public trust.”
Other bar associations signed a statement accusing the Trump administration of “treating [the law] as merely advisory, narrowly instrumental, mercilessly enforceable, or utterly irrelevant.”
It is not surprising that these actions by the bar associations received very little media coverage. They were not backed up with any further actions, testimonies, convocations, or alliances with grassroots groups to show the media that they mean business. There was no call for impeachment or even congressional hearings to expose these known, ongoing serial violations of the law, the Constitution, and treaties. (See Letter to President Trump – 22 Impeachable Offenses, April 30, 2025. New version to be released later.)
Reporters and others understand the difference between statements for the record and action on the ramparts. Words not followed by the exercise of these bar associations’ manifold status and power are largely ignored, especially when they are in legalese, and lacking conclusory judgments about Trump’s unfitness for office. Incredibly, Trump declared, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not the Constitution or the laws of the land.
Trump is a shameless, arrogant bloviator who is self-indicting daily. Critics who want to deter his slanderous and absurd outbursts should use tough, accurate language to describe his vicious actions and autocratic control of the federal government. Words like “dictator,” “serial law violator,” “extortionist,” “inciter of violence,” “persecutor of innocents for purposes of vengeance or bigotry,” “racist,” “abuser of women,” “chronic egotistical liar about serious matters of state,” “shredder of safety and health protections” and constantly “delusional,” and so forth.
New leaders from the legal community (including prominent law professors) need to immediately come forth and jolt this largely AWOL profession into action, with all its unused powers for justice and the rule of law behind our constitutional Republic. Lawyers are called members of a learned profession. They operate within ethical standards. Why aren’t they seriously working to counter Trump’s assault on the administration of justice in America?
Keep ReadingShow Less
America Under Siege: Fear and the Unchecked Presidency
A republic cannot survive this indefinitely. The removal of Donald Trump from office—which is now imperative—is not about vengeance; it is about preservation.
Jan 14, 2026
There are moments when the danger facing a nation is not announced by sirens or declarations of war, but by something quieter and more corrosive: fear—abroad and at home—paired with the normalization of lawlessness at the very top of power.
The United States is living through such a moment.
A growing number of economists, constitutional scholars, and foreign-policy experts—including Professor Jeffrey Sachs—have warned that the country is now operating under an effectively unchecked presidency, and this is very dangerous. What once sounded theoretical has become tangible. Executive conduct has crossed from aggressive policy into outright violations of constitutional structure, international law, and basic norms of human dignity—leaving Americans and foreign populations alike unsure where law ends and coercion begins.
Consider Venezuela. A sitting head of state was forcibly apprehended and remains detained despite long-established principles of head-of-state immunity recognized by both international law and US courts. No congressional declaration of war was issued. No authorization for the use of military force was granted. Yet naval deployments, explicit threats of escalation, and coercive demands have proceeded as if constitutional limits were optional.
This is not a policy disagreement. It is a rupture of the separation of powers.
A republic cannot survive this indefinitely.
Under the Constitution, Congress—not the President—decides when the nation enters hostilities. When force is used without that authorization, the injury is not foreign; it is domestic. It alters the legal obligations of service members, bypasses elected representatives, and establishes precedents that future presidents will inherit and may get to expand. What is done once without consequence becomes permissible forever.
The international consequences are equally severe. When restraint is publicly described as conditional on “cooperation,” the message is unmistakable: compliance is demanded under threat. Under international law, consent extracted through coercion is no consent at all. Agreements reached in such conditions are void, unstable, and corrosive to global order. They invite retaliation, miscalculation, and escalation.
Against this backdrop, the President’s own conduct has crossed from provocation into mockery.
Posting a mug-style image of himself online with the caption “Interim President of Venezuela” is not political satire—it is a display of contempt for a population already living under the shadow of military threat. Venezuelan civilians fear for their lives. Survivors of armed attacks have described, in horrific detail, the killing of guards and soldiers by US troops acting like mercenaries with no mercy, aligned with US objectives, sparing only the President and his wife to be taken alive. In that context, ridicule from the most powerful office on earth is not harmless. It is psychological warfare by indifference.
And the fear does not stop at the border.
Inside the United States, many citizens have grown quiet—not because they are indifferent, but because they are afraid. Afraid of retaliation. Afraid of being singled out. Afraid that the institutions meant to protect them are bending rather than holding. Silence, under these conditions, is not consent. It is duress.
That fear is reinforced when the President openly refuses to rule out acquiring foreign territory by force. When Greenland and Denmark rejected his demands, the response was not reassurance but continued ambiguity. Sovereignty, once treated as inviolable, was suddenly spoken of as negotiable—through pressure, leverage, or worse. This is not how democracies speak. It is how empires test boundaries.
What ties these episodes together is not ideology, but the erosion of restraint. Courts are pressured to proceed where jurisdiction is barred. Congress is sidelined in matters of war and peace. Sovereign resources are discussed as assets to be reassigned under coercive conditions. Threats substitute for diplomacy. Mockery substitutes for leadership.
A republic cannot survive this indefinitely.
The Constitution was designed precisely to prevent this concentration of power. War powers were placed in Congress to slow escalation. Immunities were recognized to prevent cycles of retaliation. Diplomacy was meant to replace force, not disguise it. When these guardrails fail, the danger is not merely to foreign nations—it is to the constitutional order itself.
The most alarming feature of the present moment is not outrage, but normalization. Each uncorrected violation lowers the threshold for the next. Each silence under fear teaches power that it need not explain itself.
America is now at a point where clarity is no longer optional. A President who acts beyond constitutional authority must be confronted with the limits of that authority. Violations of the Constitution and of international law must be acknowledged—not obscured, denied, or ridiculed—and immediately remedied through full and lawful redress (as guaranteed by the First Amendment’s right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances). The alternative is not ambiguity. It is consequence.
If redress is refused, if illegality is neither recognized nor corrected, the Constitution provides a final safeguard. Removal from office is not vengeance; it is a mechanism of preservation. It exists precisely for moments when power becomes unmoored from law.
“America Under Siege” does not mean tanks in the streets. It means a nation deciding whether constitutional limits still matter when they become inconvenient. And history is unforgiving to republics that delay that decision for too long.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'None of This Is Legal... Trump Should Be Impeached': Will Congress Act Against Trump Lawlessness?
"Congress must do the right thing by voting to stop this obvious catastrophe."
Jan 05, 2026
President Donald Trump's invasion of Venezuela is generating fresh calls for his impeachment and removal from office.
Shortly after the US military bombed the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, many experts on international law argued that the president's actions were completely illegal.
In an interview with the New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner, Yale Law School professor Oona Hathaway said that she didn't believe there "is a legal basis for what we’re seeing in Venezuela," while adding that the arguments the Trump administration will likely make simply "don't hold water."
For instance, Hathaway noted that while the United Nations charter allows nations to use military force in self-defense against military aggression, the administration's claims that attacking Maduro was a defensive measure intended to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the US was completely outside the scope of traditional self-defense.
"If drug trafficking is a reasonable justification, then a whole range of possible arguments can be made that basically mean that self-defense is no longer a real exception," she argued. "It’s the new rule. Why couldn’t you make the same argument about communicable diseases? There’s bird flu coming from a country, and therefore we have a legal justification for the use of military force. Once we start going down that road, the idea that there’s any limit evaporates."
Hathaway also said that Trump's militaristic ambitions seem to have grown throughout his second term, and she warned they could lead to a long and bloody US military occupation of Venezuela.
"In his press conference, Trump said that the United States would 'run the country,'" she said. "And he made it clear that he was not 'afraid' to put boots on the ground—for years, if necessary... it’s nothing like anything Trump has done before today. His previous illegal uses of force were all over shortly after they began. The scale of the operation that will be required is massive, and it means putting US soldiers at long-term risk."
Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith wrote a lengthy analysis after the attack on Venezuela and also concluded that it violated the UN charter. What's more, Goldsmith argued that Trump's state plan to seize Venezuela's oil would likely run afoul of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which limits actions that occupying powers can take on the countries they are overseeing.
"There are a lot of international law rules and restrictions that purport to govern what the United States can do as an occupying power," he explained. "I don’t have space here to review them, but suffice it to say that these rules will touch on President Trump’s stated aim of 'tak[ing] back the oil' and 'get[ting] reimbursed.' We will see if the administration takes these rules seriously."
Many Trump critics also argued that, legality aside, toppling a foreign head of state and vowing to seize their nation's natural resources was morally wrong and deserving of impeachment.
"This is the behavior of a mob boss—but with nuclear weapons and the world's strongest military," argued Zeteo editor-in-chief Medhi Hassan. "None of this is legal. Trump should be impeached by Congress and indicted at The Hague."
Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, denounced Trump's attack on Venezuela as "wildly illegal, immoral, and irresponsible," and urged the US Congress to exercise its powers to stop the president from further escalation.
"The power to declare war belongs to Congress and the American people," Greenberg said. "Trump has once again taken power that's not his. He is attempting to drag the country into war by decree, all while treating the presidency like a throne. Congress must act immediately to stop these illegal strikes and hold the Trump regime accountable. No Kings, No War."
Cavan Kharrazian, senior policy adviser for Demand Progress, demanded congressional action to "stop this reckless, unconstitutional act of war."
"We have seen what happens when the White House invents a pretext to launch a regime change war with an oil-rich nation: disaster and suffering for innocent civilians, our troops and their families, all while costing the American taxpayer a fortune as well," said Kharrazian. "Congress must do the right thing by voting to stop this obvious catastrophe."
Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic candidate for US Congress in Illinois, wrote on Bluesky that the time for Democratic politicians to issue mealy-mouthed statements about Trump's actions was over.
"Democrats need to grow a fucking spine," she wrote. "No more strongly worded letters. It’s time to draft articles of impeachment. Impeach. Convict. Remove."
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) also demanded that members of his party take a strong stance against Trump's illegal Venezuela attack.
"The silence from many media-hyped 2028 contenders today is shocking," he wrote on X. "If you cannot oppose this regime change war for oil, you don't have the moral clarity or guts to lead our party or nation."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular