21 AGs in Republican states have sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to “explicitly reject” both articles of impeachment from the House, as they are both “destructive of separation of powers” and are “contrary to the Framer’s vision of the impeachment power”:

FOX NEWS – The attorneys general of 21 states have come forward with a blistering rebuke of the impeachment of President Trump, asserting that it “establishes a dangerous historical precedent.” The Republican attorneys general, in a letter submitted to the Senate Wednesday morning and obtained by Fox News, urged the chamber conducting Trump’s trial to “reject” the impeachment articles. “If not expressly repudiated by the Senate, the theories animating both Articles will set a precedent that is entirely contrary to the Framers’ design and ruinous to the most important governmental structure protections contained in our Constitution: the separation of powers,” they wrote. The letter accuses House Democrats of impeaching Trump as a politically motivated response to the 2016 election and warned that it poses a threat to the 2020 election as well. “Even an unsuccessful effort to impeach the President undermines the integrity of the 2020 presidential election because it weaponizes a process that should only be initiated in exceedingly rare circumstances and should never be used for partisan purposes,” the letter continued.

Abuse of Power…

The attorneys general proceeded to pick apart the impeachment articles themselves. The abuse of power article, they claimed, “is based upon a constitutionally-flawed theory” that is “infinitely expansive and subjective” because it relies on the motivation the president had for “exercising concededly lawful constitutional authority” (emphasis in original) that Democrats deemed to be corrupt. “It cannot be a legitimate basis to impeach a President for acting in a legal manner that may also be politically advantageous,” they continued. “Such a standard would be cause for the impeachment of virtually every President, past, present, and future.”







Obstruction of Congress…

The attorneys general claimed that the second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, is “equally flawed,” arguing that the House’s theory means that a president can be impeached for invoking executive privilege. Doing so would render the privilege “meaningless,” they said, because it would place the privilege “under unilateral control of the House.” Rather than impeach Trump for using privilege to block witnesses from testifying before the House’s impeachment inquiry, they should have gone to court to challenge the president and enforce subpoenas, they said. The precedent set by this impeachment, they warned, “will erode the separation of powers shared by the executive and legislative branches by subjugating future Presidents to the whims of the majority opposition party in the House of Representatives.”

Fox News says the 21 state AGs that signed the letter are from “Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

You can read the full letter below: