The articles of impeachment could easily be tossed out as a “no bill” or as a bill designated as a “Bill of Attainder.”
You could hardly call what was done by Schiff , and Nadler in the house the predicate for a fair trial.The Bill of Attainder clause in the Constitution was meant to apply to a situation like the Senate faces now.
Bills of Attainder are specifically barred by Article 1 , section 9, clause 3 of the Constitution.
You can read the history of why Bills of Attainder are barred from passage in the House. Kings in England used to use them in England to seize property or jail/execute people who disagreed with them without a trial. George the III’s representatives in the Colonies used them . That’s why the founders put the clause in the Constitution.
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A bill of attainder (also known as an act of attainder or writ of attainder or bill of penalties) is an act of a legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them, often without a trial. As with attainder resulting from the normal judicial process, the effect of such a bill is to nullify the targeted person’s civil rights, most notably the right to own property (and thus pass it on to heirs), the right to a title of nobility, and, in at least the original usage, the right to life itself. Bills of attainder passed in Parliament by Henry VIII on 29 January 1542 resulted in the executions of a number of notable historical figures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder
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The constitution
Article I , Section 9, clause 3
“No Bill of Attainder...shall be passed.
The history of why the clause was included in the Cnstitution:
https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/62/bill-of-attainder
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PING
Jim Robinson wrote:
We the people need to know why the Trump impeachment case has not been tossed out...