[M]y initial reaction upon reading White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter to the House is — adapting a line from the great legal scholar Tom Cruise (A Few Good Men) — to wonder whether the White House counsel was sick the day they taught law at law school.

Yes, it’s that bad. If one of my students made those arguments in a paper, I don’t think I could give that person a passing grade.

— Prominent libertarian legal scholar Ilya Somin, in some immediate thoughts given on Facebook after White House Counsel Pat Cipollone released his letter to Congressional Democrats, where he openly mocked the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, stating not only that the president could not “permit his administration to participate in this partisan inquiry under these circumstances,” but that it “lack[ed] any legitimate constitutional foundation” and violated “the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent.” Somin isn’t the only prominent lawyer who found Cipollone’s letter absurd.

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.