Here’s how the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause could doom Trump’s presidency

“Emoluments” isn’t a word that typically comes up in everyday conversations in the United States, but it’s a word that President Donald Trump and his attorneys could be thinking about a lot if a lawsuit involving the president and emoluments continues to progress.

Around 200 members of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives have filed a lawsuit against Trump for allegedly violating the U.S. Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which states that a president is not allowed to receive gifts from foreign powers without Congress’ permission. And U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan addressed the lawsuit on April 30, when he wrote a 48-page opinion that rejected Trump’s efforts to have it thrown out. The lawsuit, Sullivan ruled, should go forward.

Stephen Rohde, discussing the lawsuit in a May 13 article for the American Prospect, stresses that the Emoluments Clause goes back to the Founding Fathers and that blatantly violating it is an impeachable offense. Trump, Rohde points out, “is the only president for at least 40 years who has not liquidated his business assets or put them in a blind trust” — and the lawsuit from members of Congress alleges that the president “has a financial interest in vast business holdings around the world that engage in dealings with foreign governments and receive benefits from those governments.”

View the complete May 14 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.