Prout v. Starr and Impeachment

When anyone asks me what is my favorite Supreme Court case, I say Prout v. Starr. Prout was an obscure case decided in 1903. Even most constitutional scholars are aware of the case and its importance. If you want detail about the case, I suggest your read my book "Defending Freedom of Contract". Prout was an 11th Amendment case where Justice George Shiras held that all provisions, clauses, and amendments in the constitutional are all on equal footing. From any mathematical distributive properties principles one can easily assume that if all clauses are equal than so to are the powers of federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances. To some this may be seem obvious, but the history of US law is to violate these principles and the Trump impeachment fiasco is no different. The Prout decision declared the state governments could not hide behind the 11th amendment declaring state sovereignty so they can default on contracts (protected by the contracts clause) with citizens. In other words, if the law fails one provision of the constitution, then the entire law is void. It seems obvious, but trust me, this is not how modern 11th amendment cases are decided (see Seminole Tribe v. Florida). After all, if the government does not obtain proper warrants to search a property, the evidence found is inadmissible in a court of law because they violated the 4th Amendment.

So, the findings of the Horowitz report are very troubling. If the FBI had a legal predicate to open a case against the Trump campaign, they certainly did not have any legal right to continue the case by violating the 4th Amendment. I believe this puts most of the findings of the Mueller investigation into question including all the convictions of General Flynn and the others. The only reason any information was obtained was because a case was opened and sustained using questionable and unlawful methods. If separation of powers are equal, then the justice department is violating that principle to go after the executive branch using unlawful methods. The same is true for the Trump impeachment. Congress cannot bend the law to uphold the Constitution. Even if Trump is guilty of some crime, by prohibiting him due process is a violation of the Constitution. Interestingly, one charge against Trump holds no water: Obstructing Congress. Congress said Trump obstructed justice by not honoring their subpoenas. This is not true since the SCOTUS decided to hear the case about subpoenas issued against Trump for his tax returns. If SCOTUS is hearing these cases, then the question of Congressional subpoenas against the executive has yet to been addressed. If it is yet to been addressed then how is Trump obstructing Congress?

The bottom line is that the principles found in Prout are very important and make understanding the Constitution easy. When the court inputs biases and opinions then they are saying clauses are not equal and they must put in place balancing tests and other criteria to address why they see for instance, the first amendment having more power than say the 9th or 10th amendment. This is how SCOTUS loses its way.