Politics

Impeachment Is the Cure

This past Friday, Bill Moyers Journal focused on the subject of impeachment. He had as his guests Bruce Fein (conservative), a constitutional scholar, who wrote the first article of impeachment against President Clinton, and John Nichols (liberal), the Washington correspondent for The Nation, and an associate editor of the Capitol Times. This interview was very enlightening with regard to how and when impeachment was intended, by the authors of the Constitution, to be used in order to preserve the checks and balances that are the cornerstone of our governmental structure and process. The founding fathers did not intend for impeachment to be used as a tool wielded by one political party against another. They intended it to be used in the event of a constitutional crisis - when the constitutional system of checks and balances was being threatened. Here is how John Nichols explains the founders’ intentions with regard to the use of impeachment.

You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don’t mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don’t have to have a war. We don’t have to raise an army and go to Washington. We have procedures in place where we can sanction a president appropriately, do what needs to be done up to the point of removing him from office and continue the republic. So we’re not talking here about taking an ax to government. Quite the opposite. We are talking about applying some necessary strong medicine that may cure not merely the crisis of the moment but, done right…might actually cure…

And with regard to why impeachment is critical for our country at this point he said the following:

Again, this is why raising impeachment at this point, it’s a very late point, is so important. Because we are defining what the presidency will be in the future today because we do know the high crimes and misdemeanors of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They have been well illustrated even by a– rather lax media. They have been discussed in Congress

If we know these things and we do not hold them to account, then we are saying, as a people and as a Congress, we are saying that we can find out that you have violated the rule of law. We can find out that you have disregarded the Constitution. You– we can find out that you’ve done harm to the republic. But there will still be no penalty for that. If that’s the standard that we’ve set, it will hold. It will not be erased in the future.

Neither Fein, nor Nichols seemed to have any doubt that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have violated the rule of law as set forth by the Constitution. In fact, they both expressed the view that Bush and Cheney’s violations are well known and understood by Congress, the media, and the citizens of America. This being the case, it is the DUTY of Congress, the media, and the citizens of America to call for the impeachment of these individuals. If we do not, we are condoning and allowing the continuation of actions and policies that are doing serious harm to our country.

I have extracted some of the content from this interview that I found the most educational below. If you are interested in reading the entire transcript, or viewing the interview, click here and go to the July 13, 2007 item.

BRUCE FEIN: think Bush’s crimes are a little bit different. I think they’re a little bit more worrisome than Clinton’s…..More worrisome than Clinton’s– because he is seeking more institutionally to cripple checks and balances and the authority of Congress and the judiciary to superintend his assertions of power…..

JOHN NICHOLS: I think that the war on terror, as defined by our president, is perpetual war. And I think that he has acted precisely as Madison feared. He has taken powers unto himself that were never intended to be in the executive. And, frankly, that when an executive uses them, in the way that this president has, you actually undermine the process of uniting the country and really focusing the country on the issues that need to be dealt with. Let’s be clear. If we had a president who was seeking to inspire us to take seriously the issues that are in play and to bring all the government together, he’d be consulting with Congress. He’d be working with Congress. And, frankly, Congress, through the system of checks and balances, would be preventing him from doing insane things like invading Iraq….

BRUCE FEIN: ….No one wants other downgrade the fact that we have abominations out there and people want to kill us. But we should not inflate the danger and we should not cast aside what we are as a people. We can fight and defeat these individuals, these criminals, based upon our system of law and justice. It’s not a– we have a fighting constitution. It’s always worked in the past. But it still remains the constitution of checks of balances….

BRUCE FEIN: ….with the consent of Congress and the president working hand in glove with consistent with due process of law, we have the authority to suspend habeas corpus in times of invasion or rebellion. It has enabled us to defeat all of our enemies consistent with the law…

JOHN NICHOLS: ….Jumped around Congress at every turn. I mean, they don’t even tell them, they don’t consult with them. They clearly have no regard for the checks and balances. But the other thing that’s– in play here– and I think this is a– much deeper problem. I think the members of our Congress have no understanding of the Constitution. And as a result, they– don’t understand their critical role in the governance of the country….

BRUCE FEIN: There’s always going to be a political element, Bill. But in the past, there’s always been a few statesmen who have said, “You know, the political fallout doesn’t concern me as much as the Constitution of the United States.” We have to keep that undefiled throughout posterity ’cause if it’s not us, it will corrode. It will disappear on the installment plan. And that has been true in the past. When we had during Watergate Republicans and remember Barry Goldwater, Mr. Republican, who approached the president and said, “You’ve got to resign.” There have always been that cream who said the country is more important than my party. We don’t have that anymore…..

JOHN NICHOLS: …An awfully lot of Americans understand what Thomas Jefferson understood. And that is that the election of a president does not make him a king for four years. That if a president sins against the Constitution– and does damage to the republic, the people have a right in an organic process to demand of their House of Representatives, the branch of government closest to the people, that it act to remove that president….

BILL MOYERS: Bruce, you talk about overreaching. What, in practical terms, do you mean by that?

BRUCE FEIN: It means asserting powers and claiming that there are no other branches that have the authority to question it. Take, for instance, the assertion that he’s made that when he is out to collect foreign intelligence, no other branch can tell him what to do. That means he can intercept your e-mails, your phone calls, open your regular mail, he can break and enter your home. He can even kidnap you, claiming I am seeking foreign intelligence and there’s no other branch Congress can’t say it’s illegal–judges can’t say this is illegal. I can do anything I want. That is overreaching. When he says that all of the world, all of the United States is a military battlefield because Osama bin Laden says he wants to kill us there, and I can then use the military to go into your homes and kill anyone there who I think is al-Qaeda or drop a rocket, that is overreaching. That is a claim even King George III didn’t make….

JOHN NICHOLS: ..Now the fact of the matter is that on foreign policy, Dick Cheney believes that the executive branch should be supreme. He said this back to the days when he was in the House during Iran-Contra. He wrote the minority report saying Congress shouldn’t sanction the president in any way, President Reagan…If Cheney believes in this expansive power. You’ve got a– unique crisis, a unique problem because the vice-president of the United States believes that Congress shouldn’t even be a part of the foreign policy debate. And he is setting the foreign policy…

BRUCE FEIN: ….we do find this peculiarity that Congress is giving up powers voluntarily. because there’s nothing right now, Bill, that would prevent Congress from the immediate shutting down all of George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s illegal programs. Simply saying there’s no money to collect foreign intelligence…the power of the purse. That is an absolute power. And yet Congress shies from it. It was utilized during the Vietnam War, you may recall, in 1973. Congress said there’s no money to go and extend the war into Laos and Cambodia. And even President Nixon said okay. This was a president who at one time said, “If I do it, it’s legal.”

JOHN NICHOLS: … the Scooter Libby affair gets to the heart of what I think an awfully lot of Americans are concerned about with this administration and with the executive branch in– general, that it is lawless, that– it can rewrite the rules for itself, that it can protect itself.

And, you know, the founders anticipated just such a moment. If you look at the discussions in the Federalist Papers but also at the Constitutional Convention, when they spoke about impeachment, one of the things that Madison and George Mason spoke about was the notion that you needed the power to impeach particularly as regards to pardons and commutations because a president might try to take the burden of the law off members of his administration to prevent them from cooperating with Congress in order to expose wrongdoings by the president himself. And so Madison said that is why we must have the power to impeach. Because otherwise a president might be able to use his authority and pardons and such to prevent an investigation from getting to him….

JOHN NICHOLS: …But the founders who had recently fought a revolution against a king named George would tell you that monarchical behavior, the behavior of a king, acting like a king, is an impeachable offense. You need not look for specific laws or statutes. What you need to look for is a pattern of behavior that says that the presidency is superior not merely to Congress but to the laws of the land, to the rules of law. And that is why we ought to be discussing impeachment. Not because of George Bush and Dick Cheney but because we are establishing a presidency that does not respect the rule of law. And people, Americans, are rightly frightened by that. Their fear is the fear of the founders. It is appropriate. It is necessary…

JOHN NICHOLS: …there is absolutely a good that comes of this if the process begins, if we take it seriously. And the founders would have told you that, — that impeachment is a dialogue. It is a discourse. And it is an educational process. If Congress were to get serious about the impeachment discussions, to hold the hearings, to begin that dialogue, they would begin to educate the American people and perhaps themselves about the system of checks and balances, about the powers of the presidency, about, you know, what we can expect and what we should expect of our government…

BILL MOYERS: …But read that prologue of the Constitution. The first obligation (of our elected officials) is to defend the people, to defend their freedom, to defend their rights…

It is time for us, the citizens of American to call on our Congress to do their duty. It is our duty, if we love our country, to do everything in our power to encourage the Congress to do theirs - impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Now!! Before the power they have usurped gets passed on to another President and Vice President.

Call and e-mail your Congressional representatives and implore them to support Dennis Kucinich’s bill (H.R.333) calling for bringing Articles of Impeachment against VP Cheney, and demand that they sponsor a similar bill calling for bringing Articles of Impeachment against President Bush.

This is not about which political party you support, this is about supporting our country and our Constitution.

© 2007 Life is an Ongoing Process.