Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to impeach the president. Any president who is impeached is tried by the Senate.

The relevant sentence says:

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

The White House sent a letter to the House declaring that its impeachment inquiry was “unconstitutional.”

The Washington Post wrote about this bizarre opinion and cited various legal scholars.

In a series of legal maneuvers that have defied Congress, drawn rebukes from federal judges and tested the country’s foundational system of checks and balances, President Trump has made an expansive declaration of presidential immunity that would essentially place him beyond the reach of the law.

In courts and before Congress, Trump’s legal teams are simultaneously arguing two contradictory points: that the president can’t be investigated or indicted by prosecutors because Congress has the sole responsibility for holding presidents accountable, and that the House’s impeachment inquiry is an unconstitutional effort that the White House can ignore.

“We have a president who simply doesn’t believe that Congress is a coequal branch of government,” said Elliot Williams, who helped run the Justice Department’s legislative affairs office during the Obama administration. “That’s a huge departure from anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.”

The broad legal effort escalated on Tuesday when the White House counsel sent a letter to House Democratic leaders dismissing Congress’s impeachment inquiry as “illegitimate” and stating that the entire executive branch would refuse to cooperate with it…

In his eight-page letter to Congress on Tuesday, White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone declared that “the President has a country to lead” and claimed that Congress’s attempts at oversight were overly partisan, lacked due process and ran afoul of constitutional principles. Echoing Trump, Cipollone made several political points in his letter, accusing Democrats of trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election….

Several legal scholars panned Cipollone’s letter as a political document with little legal relevance.

Michael J. Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, said the White House letter amounted to “a bunch of political talking points” with a “completely backwards” interpretation of the Constitution.

The Constitution gives the House the “sole power of impeachment” and does not prescribe how the process should unfold, said Gerhardt, author of “Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

“The president doesn’t get to dictate to the House how it should do its job,” he said. “This is an attempt to flout the law and place the president above the law.”

Ilya Somin, a professor at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, joked in a Facebook post that the Trump administration’s legal reasoning made him wonder “whether the White House counsel was sick the day they taught law at law school.”

Somin also rejected the assertion from the White House that the inquiry violates “constitutionally mandated due process.” An impeachment inquiry, he said in an interview, is not a criminal trial.

“What’s at stake is losing a position of power,” Somin said. “None of the rights the White House demands” are required by the Constitution.

But Trump has long held an expansive view of executive power and has cited Article II of the Constitution, which defines the powers of the executive branch, as a catchall that gives him wide latitude.

“Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” Trump said in a June interview with ABC News.

Several federal judges have disagreed with the administration’s claim that the president is above the law.

A federal judge in New York this week called Trump’s claims of immunity “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” The judge denied the president’s request to block the Manhattan district attorney from accessing Trump’s tax returns. “The Court cannot square a vision of presidential immunity that would place the President above the law with the text of the Constitution, the historical record, the relevant case law” or any other authority, wrote U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

In an earlier ruling in Washington, issued before the start of the House impeachment inquiry, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta refused to stop a House subpoena for Trump’s accounting firm records.

“It is simply not fathomable,” the judge wrote, “that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct — past or present — even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.”

Clearly, Trump has never read Article II of the Constitution, which does not allow him to do whatever he wants.  His lawyer seems to think that Trump is just too darn busy running the country to be impeached, but the Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment, notwithstanding the president’s busy schedule (Trump’s schedule consists mainly of watching FOX News, tweeting, lunching with Mike Pence, and playing golf).

If the House votes to impeach, Trump will have the rights of due process at his Senate trial.

That is, if the Constitution means what it says.