Impeaching the top three wreckers of the Constitution
Two, three, many Nixons: if impeachment was good enough for Tricky Dick...
Even Nixon, in asserting executive privilege in the heat of the Watergate scandal, did not claim that it applied to decisions made in the Justice Department. Attorney General John Mitchell, found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice, could not be protected from prosecution for his part in what he called the "White House horrors."
Dick Cheney, the greatest exponent of the Nixonian concept of the presidency, more successful than Nixon, has usurped in his grasp of executive power even command of domestic legal policy. But we have seen only a flicker of a shadow of his power. And Bush knows that Rove, too, has played puppet master. Losing Gonzales would raise the curtain on this era's "White House horrors." So Bush throws executive privilege over everyone he can. The yes man has become the indispensable man. (my emphasis)
That's from Sidney Blumenthal's latest, The three stoogesSalon 08/02/07.
Cheney seems determined to push his administration's confrontation with Congress to the point of impeachment. And at this point, I don't see that the Democrats have much of a choice left in the case of Abu Gonzales. Either they impeach him for "high crimes" in defiance of Congress - and hopefully for conspiring to torture prisoners, as well - or they back down and let the Cheney theory of the Unilateral Executive stand as a precedent for the next Republican Presidency.
I continue to think that impeachment of both Bush and Cheney is necessary, even if the authoritarian Republican Party sticks by them in the Senate (we can take it for granted the Joe Lieberman will vote with Cheney and Bush) so that a conviction is impossible. But that shouldn't be a deterrent to putting the House of Representatives formally on record that various bad acts of this administration constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors" in the Constitutional sense for impeaching the Chief Executive. Precedents matter.
Here I disagree (partly) with Gene Lyons, a guy with whom I agree more often than not. He writes in his latest, Congress should impeach Gonzales Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 08/01/07:
For all its emotional appeal, this column has always opposed wasting time and energy on the impeachment of President Bush. That’s not to say one couldn't draw up a list of impeachable offenses, from taking the nation to war on false premises to countenancing such outrages against the Constitution as warrantless wiretaps, false imprisonment and torture. The votes, however, simply don’t exist. Congressional Republicans remain committed to Bush/Cheney, along with the party’s hard-core base. Dragging the nation through another fruitless, made-for-TV spectacle like the Clinton impeachment would look like cheap revenge. It would threaten to turn a grave constitutional remedy into a commonplace political sideshow. That said, Congress should quit pussyfooting around and impeach Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at once. Halfway measures like a special prosecutor would only produce more of what Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N. Y., characterizes as Gonzales’ strategy of “the half-truth, the partial truth and anything but the truth.” For once, I agree with Newt Gingrich. Appearing on “FOX News Sunday,” he declined to defend Gonzales against accusations of repeatedly lying to Congress.
“I think it’s very damaging,” Gingrich said. "[W ] e badly need an attorney general who is above any question.... Both the president and country are better served if the attorney general is seen as a figure of probity and a figure of integrity and a figure of competence. And sadly, the current attorney general is not seen as any of those things. And I think that it’s a liability for the president. More importantly, it’s a liability for the United States of America.” (my emphasis)
I'm down with him on impeaching Gonzales, certainly.
But I think he's not giving enough weight to some important factors when it comes to the two worst Constitution malefactors.
On the concern of turning "a grave constitutional remedy into a commonplace political sideshow", the grave Constitutional remedy was put there mainly to deal with a grave Constitutional crisis, like the one we have now. The fact that the authoritarian Republicans abused that remedy during Clinton's Presidency like they are abusing the Constitution now doesn't change the fact, as Lyons himself notes, that this administration has committed several impeachable offenses, his list including "taking the nation to war on false premises to countenancing such outrages against the Constitution as warrantless wiretaps, false imprisonment and torture".
He's also not giving enough weight to the reality that the authoritarian Republican Party will not hesitate to use impeachment against a new Democratic administration. They don't give a flying fig about making "a grave constitutional remedy into a commonplace political sideshow". And they will have no compunction about doing it again, either against the President or other officials, if it seems to fit their narrow partisan political agenda.
I believe that a serious impeachment process against this administration would have the effect of reminding the public - for whom Nixon's near-impeachment is a fading memory but the "political sideshow" of the Clinton impeachment is much fresher - that impeaching a President or Vice President really is a serious Constitutional matter, one not to be used lightly.
Also, the question of getting the votes in the Senate is very much related to whether it would be politically beneficial for the Democrats. At this juncture, I have a hard time constructing any scenario in my head where it would be bad for the Dems in the most narrow partisan political sense. Polls are already showing roughly half the public want both Cheney and Bush impeached, even though the Democrats have mostly been treating the idea like bubonic plague.
A well-conducted impeachment investigation, one which I have every confidence in Nancy Pelosi to pull off, will lay out in dramatic detail just how reckless, dishonest and irresponsible this administration has been virtually across the board. That will surely increase the public support for impeachment. And that's the only way to create even the possibility that 17 Republican Senators would get to the point where they would vote to remove Cheney and Bush.
(That assumes 50 Dems voting to remove, Joe Lieberman voting against removal, which means that 17 Reps would have to join the Dems on the Senate vote to remove.)
I don't think it will happen either. But I also think it is beneficial to put Congress on record against the "high crimes and misdemeanors" at stake. A House impeachment vote would be one way to do that. A majority Senate vote to remove, even if it fell short of the needed 67, would also reinforce the seriousness and substance of the charges. (None of the impeachment charges against Bill Clinton won even a majority vote in the Senate trial.)
And the seemingly genuine Republican dismay over Gonzales raises some possibility that after the process of a full impeachment investigation that a number of Republican Senators might vote for removal.
Since I know how risky it is to predicate anything on the assumption that Republicans who criticize something about the Cheney-Bush administration will actually do anything about it, I'll repeat that I know that a 67 vote in the Senate to remove Cheney and Bush is highly unlikely. It would be a near-miracle even in the case of Abu Gonzales.
But in all three cases, it's worth the attempt.
A final thought on timing. The 2008 is starting to become visibly closer. It's just six months until the California primary. Now that the primaries are bunched so closely together early in the primary season, after that vote we're probably going to have a good idea who both the Democratic and Republican nominees will be.
In practice, I would say it's unlikely that the Democrats will be willing to undertake an impeachment process against Cheney and Bush that would be likely to spill over into the general election campaign, if only because it would add a huge element of unpredictability.
Given the seriousness of the Constitutional issues, it seems to me that even voting impeachment charges out of the House after the November 2008 elections would be appropriate and beneficial. But if the Dems aren't willing to do it now when the partisan political payoff could be big, they are very unlikely to do it then.
With all that in mind, working back from August as the beginning of the general election campaign, I'm thinking that early April is the latest that we can expect the Dems to venture on impeachment proceedings, barring some catastrophic development. That's eight months away.
Two, three, many Nixons: if impeachment was good enough for Tricky Dick...
