NYMag – Before Donald Trump got elected, few Americans had heard of or paid much attention to the Emoluments Clause, a previously obscure-to-most-of-us provision in Article I of the Constitution dealing with corruption and curry-favoring at the hands of foreign governments. In the wake of his election, though, a growing chorus of voices, many of them legal experts, began debating about whether the wording of the clause could render Trump impeachable, more or less from the moment he is sworn in.
This conversation has ramped up in large part because Trump himself has insisted that should he choose to take office without divesting from his extensive, tangled business holdings — and that certainly appears to be his plan at the moment — it won’t be a problem. “I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business,” Trump famously told the New York Times last month. “The law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”
The Emoluments Clause is an important Yeah, but … response: Yes, some legal experts have argued, the president is exempt from certain federal conflict-of-interest laws that apply to other public servants. But he isn’t exempt from the Emoluments Clause — if he doesn’t divest, he’ll be violating that and could be impeached. Now, this isn’t a unanimous view. Last month, for example, Maynooth University law professor Seth Barrett Tillman argued that it isn’t clear the Emoluments Clause applies to elected officials like the president, as opposed to appointed ones. He also pointed out an instance in which George Washington apparently received foreign gifts without much protest from even his enemies, and, “As Professor Akhil Amar has reminded us, the precedents set by President Washington and his administration deserve special deference in regard to both foreign affairs and presidential etiquette.”
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