Here is what precedes the previous excerpt:

It is a measure of the foresight of the Founding Fathers that every few years we suddenly consider some obscure part of the Constitution that had long been ignored, from the procedures for impeachment to the resolution of deadlocked elections. This year, thanks to Donald Trump’s sprawling global business empire, it’s the foreign-emoluments clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8): No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state. How obscure is the foreign-emoluments clause? There are few references to it in the convention and ratifying debates of 1787, the courts have never been asked to interpret it, and Congress has never charged any federal official with violating it. Potential violations rarely get farther than the Office of Legal Counsel, which in 2009 advised President Obama that his Nobel Peace Prize (a gratuitous gift if ever there was one) did not violate the clause, since the Nobel committee is not a foreign sovereign. But the foreign-emoluments clause wasn’t an afterthought in the Constitution. It was carried over from the Articles of Confederation, which in turn had borrowed it from a 17th-century Dutch statute. It was chiefly aimed at the practice among European royalty of lavishing gifts on foreign diplomats, but it was written to cover all federal officers. A constitutional amendment that was passed by Congress in 1810 and nearly ratified would have expanded the clause beyond federal officers to cover every American citizen and strip the citizenship of anyone who violated it. The concern it reflects for insidious corruption of American officials by foreign sovereigns remains a serious one, touching on issues that range from foreign donations to the Clinton Global Initiative to the long list of American officials who have ended up on the Saudi payroll after leaving office. One durable argument in favor of electing billionaires to public office is that they are too rich to be bought. Yet whatever the actual size of Trump’s fortune, he could still face a blizzard of potential conflicts of interest in representing America while his Trump Organization runs overseas hotels and golf courses that can be dependent on regulatory favor (especially in diplomatically sensitive countries such as Turkey and the Philippines), rents space to a state-owned Chinese bank in Trump Tower, and has opaque financing relationships with Russian interests. Trump’s lifelong habit of mixing business with everything else hasn’t abated even in the Oval Office. He took to Twitter to berate Nordstrom for dropping his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line, even though she had supposedly resigned from any role in the clothing business. He has also used Trump Organization properties for state purposes, footing the bill for Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to stay at Mar-a-Lago and mix with the paying members. Liberals looking for a silver bullet to justify an immediate impeachment of Trump have seized on the idea that Trump’s business dealings violate the foreign-emoluments clause. A Brookings Institution paper by Norman L. Eisen (the chairman of David Brock’s liberal gadfly group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [CREW]) and law professors Richard Painter (the vice chairman of CREW) and Laurence Tribe argues that any payment or legal benefit from a foreign government or leader to the Trump Organization — such as when a head of state or a diplomatic delegation stays at one of Trump’s hotels around the world, or even when any Trump business is granted a trademark or a building permit — would qualify as an “emolument” from a foreign sovereign that Trump might accept only with the consent of Congress. While there is scholarly debate over whether the foreign-emoluments clause actually applies to the president, based on conflicting evidence from the founding generation, Trump’s lawyers have agreed that he must comply with it. But what, exactly, is an “emolument”?