It's a serious cloud, it has to be taken seriously. It's not just a matter of coming up with great talking points or winning some debate. I think he does a disservice to the Constitution and the country when he thinks he can slide his way, slip slide his way around this serious constitutional issue.

Laurence Tribe

Categorized in : Politics

[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.

Laurence Tribe

government rights people

The federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification.

Laurence Tribe

government gun strong

An excess of law inescapably weakens the rule of law.

Laurence Tribe

rule-of-law excess law

The whole country needs to get to the bottom of what really happened with the Russian collusion allegations. But in the meantime, we have a president Donald Trump who himself says trust me. He does not accept the boundaries of law. He basically says that if anybody gets too close for comfort, I'm going to get rid of them. And as long as that's in place, we cannot afford as a country to put our fate in the hands of someone so whimsical and so unpredictable.

Laurence Tribe

fate long country

The Second Amendment does protect the right to people to possess weapons for self-defense in the home. That's what the Supreme Court said.

Laurence Tribe

self home people

Even those who, like me, believe that Roe v. Wade and the decisions elaborating on reproductive rights were constitutionally correct must recognize that, for many on the right, the sudden and relatively sloppily reasoned character of the abortion rulings... did real damage to the Court's reputation as a relatively neutral arbiter of legal disputes.

Laurence Tribe

real character believe

One of the most extraordinary examples in recent decades [of unitary visions of constitutional enterprise] is found in a book called "Takings"... Epstein makes an extremely clever but stunningly reductionist argument that the whole Constitution is really designed to protect private property... Can a constitution reflecting as diverse an array of visions and aspirations as ours really be reducible to such as sadly single-minded vision as that?

Laurence Tribe

vision clever book

Of course the president Donald Trump said he wants to get to the truth. He always says that. But I think we all know that those words do not speak as loudly as his actions.

Laurence Tribe

president action thinking

It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way.

Laurence Tribe

airports country america

There are a lot of things that fit on a bumper sticker in terms of either liberty or equality or progress that when made more concrete just don't pan out.

Laurence Tribe

progress fit liberty

Trust is not what the framers of the United States constitution and of this country relied on.

Laurence Tribe

constitution country

The only way the avoid a constitution crisis, and I'm not saying we're there yet, is to reassure the public that the person leading the government is someone who has loyalties other than to himself, not loyalties to the foreign governments that helped him financially.

Laurence Tribe

constitution crisis loyalty

Not even a SCOTUS filled with Trump appointees would get in the way of the House or Senate.

Laurence Tribe

politics

To End a Presidency : The Power of Impeachment.

Laurence Tribe

latest-headlines

Or, if Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe decides, ‘ I ’m simply not going to protect United States from foreign attack. I ’m busy making money. ’.

Laurence Tribe

latest-headlines

The issue is -- do the kinds of judges that he says he would insist on, the kind who would overrule Roe v. Wade, who don't believe in gay rights or women's rights, but who think the Constitution is frozen, if he really believes in their philosophy, it's an antiquated philosophy, but it turns out Ted Cruz drops that when it doesn't serve his purpose.

Laurence Tribe

politics

Nothing in the 14th Amendment or in any other constitutional provision suggests that the president may usurp legislative power to prevent a violation of the Constitution.

Laurence Tribe

nothing constitution president power

I do not have, nor do I believe I have seen, a vision capacious and convincing enough to propound as an organizing principle for the next phase in the law of our Constitution.

Laurence Tribe

constitution vision law believe

We need to do something about the culture of violence.

Laurence Tribe

need something violence culture

The Constitution grants only Congress - not the president - the power 'to borrow money on the credit of the United States.'

Laurence Tribe

constitution credit money power