BC LAW
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

Hot take: Courts might be able to review the legality of this impeachment, even under current political-question doctrine. Here’s why and how the issue might arise:

 Suppose Senate convicts and disqualifies Trump from ever holding federal office. Trump files paperwork to run anyway, but state officials deny his application, citing his Senate impeachment judgment. Trump sues, arguing that the judgment is void.
Normally a legal dispute about a prospective candidates eligibility to run would certainly present a justiciable case or controversy. But are courts bound to accept the Senate impeachment judgment as valid? Maybe not. Here’s why:
According to Article I, “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” This is a small amount of judicial power vested in Congress. When trying impeachments, the Senate sits as a court.
The Senate’s judicial power includes the power to decide relevant legal questions that arise, such as what procedures are sufficient to constitute a “trial” w/in the Constitution’s meaning. Such legal determinations are conclusive, as SCOTUS held in Nixon v. United States (1993).
The constitutionally required procedures and what offenses constitute impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors” are impeachment “merits” questions, so to speak. The Senate has the “sole” power to decide such questions. But *who* may be impeached is arguably different.
*Who* may be impeached and tried by the Senate is arguably a question of the Senate’s impeachment “subject-matter jurisdiction.” Without such jurisdiction, the Senate has no power at all to try. The resulting purported impeachment judgment would be void, just as would a court’s.
Imagine that the House purported to impeach an indisputably private citizen that never served as a federal official for federal crimes, and the Senate purported to try and convict them.
I’m fairly confident that we’d all agree that the Senate’s judgment would be completely void, and a court could certainly recognize this invalidity in some sort of collateral proceeding presenting the issue of the judgment’s validity.
So if we consider the who-may-be-impeached question as a matter of the Senate’s subject-matter jurisdiction to try impeachments, then later courts can likely review that question when it arises in disputes about the purported impeachment judgement’s collateral legal consequences.
A court’s subject-matter jurisdiction can pretty much always be challenged in a subsequent collateral proceeding that turns on the validity of the prior court’s judgment. This is an ancient and basic rule of judicial power. A purported judgment rendered w/o jurisdiction is void.
Senate impeachment judgments should be no different, because the Senate sits as a court when trying impeachments, exercising *judicial* power. So it all comes down to whether to consider the *who* question an issue of the Senate’s impeachment jurisdiction.
Nixon v. US presumes that the Senate has the power to try, which makes its factual and legal determinations conclusive. But if the Senate doesn’t even have the power to try in the first place—because it lacks jurisdiction over the defendant—then its “sole power” doesn’t apply.
So while I agree with @steve_vladeck, @WilliamBaude, and others that Trump indeed *can* be lawfully impeached and tried, I disagree that courts cannot answer that legal question when it arises in a normal case or controversy.
(And perhaps the more precise label for the *who* question is *personal* jurisdiction, rather than subject-matter jurisdiction, but that label doesn’t affect justiciability because either way it’s a jurisdictional question.)

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1. The judge’s stubbornly persistent refusal to acknowledge that NGO observers are professionals and have an important role to play (separate to that of the general public) in ensuring open justice, and refusal to grant us access to be able to do our jobs properly.

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Okay, here we go. In federal criminal cases, bail is governed by the Bail Reform

/2 Under the Bail Reform Act, a defendant MUST BE RELEASED ON BAIL unless the judicial officer (usually a federal magistrate judge) finds that no condition or combination of conditions will reasonably assure (1) them appearing for trial or (2) the safety of the community.

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They've never rid of of the EC, no Healthcare 4all & any gains we've gotten (NRA going bust, BLM showing us inequality) has been citizen advocacy. And citizens SHOULD do that. But we want our Dem reps to accomplish big things, too. We've given them all three branches twice.

So it's a bit difficult to ask us to swallow this "as a win" when a criminal isn't held accountable by the very means he's supposed to be held accountable.

I understand the challenges, I do. But these same naysayers also wrote off Stacy Adams in GA, and look what she did.

Political calculation is important, sure. But it's not the ONLY important thing, either. Sometimes one has to fight to the bitter end over a thing that matters, even if you lose the fight. I don't see that happened here. And it's part of a pattern. If Ds didn't have this pattern-

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law stuff & will know what they can & can't consider. For instance, there is a long-held rule that a fact witness can't make legal arguments, only a lawyer. So what will happen in a motion for summary judgment, where the entire proceeding is on paper, will play out like this:

1) Defendant makes a motion for summary judgment. It includes a sworn declaration from some fact witness.

2) The declaration includes all sorts of legal arguments about why the defendant should win. Often the declaration includes arguments the brief didn't even make.

Defendants (especially DOJ-represented ones) often do this to get around the word or page-limits placed on briefs.

3) Plaintiff moves to strike the declaration for its inclusion of inadmissible legal arguments.

4) Judge denies the motion to strike, on the grounds that a ...

judge is a sophisticated consumer of evidence & can choose what to consider & what to ignore, unlike a jury.

The legal fiction behind this impeachment exception is that Senators are also smart enough to know what to listen to & what to ignore. Now, that may not be ACCURATE, ...
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