The Atlantic

Conservatives Should Want to Impeach Trump

Outsourcing U.S. diplomacy to Rudy Giuliani was a constitutional violation—one whose gravity Republicans might see if they weren’t so busy making excuses for the president.
Source: Eric Thayer / The New York Times / Redux

The House of Representatives begins televised impeachment hearings today, and, if Republicans weren’t so desperate to avoid holding President Donald Trump accountable, they could add their own count to the indictment. Each of the three branches of government—the executive, legislative, and judiciary alike—has vital constitutional duties to perform, and no branch is free to delegate those duties to other branches of government or anybody else. Conservative legal scholars have been trying for years, for instance, to roll back legally binding regulations written by executive-branch bureaucrats rather than Congress.

But along came Trump. Overseeing American foreign policy is both the prerogative and the obligation of the president. In outsourcing U.S. policy toward Ukraine to Rudolph Giuliani, a private citizen whose loyalty lies with Trump personally—not to the office of the presidency, the interests of the United

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