Alan Dershowitz’s “Maladministration” Argument Makes No Sense

Ummmm what?

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

During a heated question-and-answer session on Wednesday, Alan Dershowitz, a member of the president’s legal team in the impeachment trial, continued to argue that even if Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine last summer qualified as an “abuse of power,” as such, it does not qualify as an impeachable offense. Instead, he said, “abuse of power” falls under the category of “maladministration”—a term rejected by the framers of the Constitution in the 18th century.

As evidence, he cited…the dictionary. “What is maladministration?” Dershowitz asked, pressing his fingertips together as he stood before the Senate chamber. “If you look it up in the dictionary and you look up synonyms, the synonyms include abuse, corruption, misrule, dishonesty, misuse of office, and misbehavior.”

The Internet promptly did some fact-checking:

Merriam-Webster defines maladministration as “corrupt or incompetent administration (as of a public office).” Macmillan has “bad or dishonest management.” According to Dictionary.com, the term means “to administer or manage badly or inefficiently.”

So, not synonymous with “abuse of power.” And of course, definitions can evolve over some 200-odd years. But even at the Constitutional Convention, it was clear that nobody could agree on the meaning of “maladministration”—and in fact, that was the very reason it was rejected as a standard for impeaching a president. Politico has the 18th-century backstory:

In the waning days of the convention, on September 8, 1787, Virginia delegate George Mason moved to add “maladministration” to the existing list of impeachable offenses—at that point, only “Treason or Bribery.” Madison objected that “so vague a term [as maladministration] will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” Mason responded by withdrawing his motion and substituting “other high crimes and misdemeanors against the state.” Mason’s revised motion passed 8-3, which is how the “high crimes and misdemeanors” language got into to the Constitution.

The puzzling rhetorical cartwheels by Dershowitz and the rest of the president’s legal team all serve the larger strategy of convincing the Senate that in order to remove the president from office, the House managers must prove that Trump had committed a criminal offense. Ironically, Dershowitz has also had to do some additional gymnastics to explain why, 22 years ago, he believed a crime was not necessary for an impeachment trial.

“What happened since 1998 is that I studied more, did more research, read more documents and like any academic altered my views. That’s what happens,” he said. “That’s what professors ought to do.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate