Thursday, January 11, 2007

Decapitation - Taking Down George W. Bush


I was wondering how long it would take after George Bush's "surge" speech before the clamour began for the president's impeachment. It sure didn't take very long.

George Bush is embarking America on yet another campaign in Iraq, where the four previous campaigns have failed. He is acting against the advice of his generals and in defiance of the wishes of Congress, of the American people and of the Iraq government itself. Nobody wants Bush to do this save the president and the neoconservatives who planted the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq in the first place.

Bush is acting less like the president of a democratic republic and more like an absolute monarch every day. He is isolated, his support base eroded, surrounded by a hostile congress and awash in public scorn. He's shown no willingness to heed their advice, to respect their wishes. He will entertain no view save his own.

Bush is asking to be impeached.

Elizabeth Holzman knows a thing of two about impeachment. As a member of congress she took part in the proceedings to impeach Richard Nixon. She believes that impeaching George Bush is the right thing to do. Holtzman makes the case for impeachment in the online magazine, The Nation:

"Like many others, I have been deeply troubled by Bush's breathtaking scorn for our international treaty obligations under the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions. I have also been disturbed by the torture scandals and the violations of US criminal laws at the highest levels of our government they may entail, something I have written about in these pages [see Holtzman, "Torture and Accountability," July 18/25, 2005]. These concerns have been compounded by growing evidence that the President deliberately misled the country into the war in Iraq. But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.

"As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government."

Holtzman realizes that it will be necessary for congress to have public support for impeachment which, she believes, will be accomplished in the course of congressional hearings about to get underway.

Among the grounds for impeachment, Holtzman begins with Bush's warrantless wiretapping, an offence under the laws and constitution of the United States.

"...Ours is a government of limited power. We learn in elementary school the concept of checks and balances. Those checks do not vanish in wartime; the President's role as Commander in Chief does not swallow up Congress's powers or the Bill of Rights. Given the framers' skepticism about executive power and warmaking--there was no functional standing army at the beginning of the nation, so the President's powers as Commander in Chief depended on Congress's willingness to create and expand an army--it is impossible to find in the Constitution unilateral presidential authority to act against US citizens in a way that violates US laws, even in wartime. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently wrote, "A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.'"

However Holtzman believes her president's most egregious crime was in deliberately lying to induce support for conquering Iraq.

"...A President can commit no more serious crime against our democracy than lying to Congress and the American people to get them to support a military action or war. It is not just that it is cowardly and abhorrent to trick others into giving their lives for a nonexistent threat, or even that making false statements might in some circumstances be a crime. It is that the decision to go to war is the gravest decision a nation can make, and in a democracy the people and their elected representatives, when there is no imminent attack on the United States to repel, have the right to make it. Given that the consequences can be death for hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people--as well as the diversion of vast sums of money to the war effort--the fraud cannot be tolerated. That both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were guilty of misleading the nation into military action and neither was impeached for it makes it more, not less, important to hold Bush accountable.

"Once it was clear that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, President Bush tried to blame "bad intelligence" for the decision to go to war, apparently to show that the WMD claim was not a deliberate deception. But bad intelligence had little or nothing to do with the main arguments used to win popular support for the invasion of Iraq.

"Mobilizing the nation and Congress in support of investigations and the impeachment of President Bush is a critical task that has already begun, but it must intensify and grow. The American people stopped the Vietnam War--against the wishes of the President--and forced a reluctant Congress to act on the impeachment of President Nixon. And they can do the same with President Bush.

"...As awful as Watergate was, after the vote on impeachment and the resignation of President Nixon, the nation felt a huge sense of relief. Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Congress got us into this mess, and contrary to what most of us (both in and out of Congress) may think, Congress DOES have the power to get us out.

The resolution that gave George W. the “power to use force” was obtained through skilful trickery and deception (motivated by NeoCon ideology and arrogance).

Those who have the power to authorize the “Use of Force” also have the power to RECIND that authority. The sooner our Congress awakens to this facet of THEIR power, the sooner this National Nightmare will end.

And it better end soon… before he starts wars with Iran and Syria.
George W. is a “Rogue Executive”, and he needs to be corralled.