Tillman and Blackman make the rubble bounce on the emoluments clause

Continuing their exposition of the emoluments clause and its inapplicability to President Trump and his business dealings, this blog's very own Prof. Seth Barrett Tillman and his co-author Prof. Josh Blackman have published this piece over at The Wall Street Journal online: The 'Resistance' vs. George Washington. Unfortunately, their article is behind the WSJ's paywall, but an excerpt can he read over at Instapundit, available here. Worth reading!

Tillman and Blackman: bringing light to President Trump and the Constitution's emoluments clause

If you've been following NRC's Facebook page, you know that this blog's own Professor Seth Barrett Tillman has co-authored a series of posts with Professor Josh Blackman over at the Washington Post online detailing flaws in efforts to apply the emoluments clause of the Constitution to President Trump and his private business activities. Their work there is high-level constitutional and historical scholarship packaged to be accessible to a non-specialist audience. And it makes crystal clear that which so many of the leading "scholars" of constitutional law would rather have opaque.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

Part 5 is here.

Professor Tillman took a lot of flack prior to publishing this series for his views on the emoluments clause and its applicability to President Trump. We won't go into that here, but here's a New York Times story about the controversy about Tillman's groundbreaking scholarship regarding the emoluments clause and its applicability to the president. His work with Professor Blackman is so definitive that his leading critics have issued formal apologies to him. Some of those apologies are online here and here.

Why is all this important? Because the emoluments clause is the basis of a lawsuit designed, ultimately, to pressure President Trump from office by targeting his businesses. The strategy targeting Trump's businesses is outlined in this post over at Instapundit. Tillman and Blackman have done yeoman's service in showing how weak the overall legal arguments against the president truly are.