Lessig: Trump’s ‘Unwillingness’ to Give up His Wealth Shows ‘Extraordinary’ Callousness to Constitution

RUSH EXCEPRT:
LESSIG: "Yeah. So many people are attacking Donald Trump are attacking him for or trying to recruit electors for a reason I don’t think is legitimate. They’re saying Donald Trump is not fit. You know, my own view is I don’t think he’s fit to be president, but 62 million Americans heard that argument and they went the other way. So I don’t think that the electors are supposed to be kind of guardians of our democracy second guessing the people with respect to the issues the people had some chance to know something about. But there are two issues that have come up after this election which are incredibly important for evaluating whether this man should be president. The first of them, of course, is his unwillingness to die vest himself from foreign assets and liabilities despite the Constitution’s clear requirements in the foreign bribery clause that he do so. This unwillingness to give up his own wealth to be president is an extraordinary show of callousness about how our constitution tries to protect us from foreign intrigue and the compromise that is caused by that. So I think that’s number one. Number two, the idea that every intelligent service in our federal government now has concluded that the Russians were involved in this election and the Trump campaign itself was directly involved as the Russians said immediately after the election should in an elector’s mind raise the question whether we should be a zero tolerance principle when they have this kind of foreign intervention in our election. Again, as you know because you read federalist 68, this was the prime concern that they had when they set up this system for selecting presidents that somebody with foreign ties would be elected president that would be no way to stop them unless they had an electoral college who should do it. Now, these are new facts. These aren’t things that anybody knew at the time of the election or at least could prove at the time of the election and it’s incumbent on the electors to consider these facts now. Now, I’m not going to tell them what they should do with them, but it’s completely reasonable in my view for them to see their moral obligation to their pledge overridden by this moral obligation to uphold these principles that are part of our constitution.”