cross-posted from Dembloggers and A Faerie’s Farthing
Neither is it just for democrats, liberals and other assorted leftists anymore. Congressional republicans have joined the calls for an investigation and the momentum for impeachment is steadily growing. Bob Barr, a former U.S. Representative who was active in Clinton’s impeachment is now turning the same ire on shrubya, saying “This is just such an egregious violation of the electronic surveillance laws.” Robert Levy, a Senior Fellow of Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute – and Board Member of the Federalist Society – makes some excellent points regarding limits on presidential power before concluding that shrubya has “overreached.” I think he was euphemizing.
In a recent interview with Diane Rehm, conservative scholars Bruce Fein and Norm Ornstein were a bit more blunt. Ornstein is quoted as saying, “I think if we’re going to be intellectually honest here, this really is the kind of thing that Alexander Hamilton was referring to when impeachment was discussed.” Fein was not so reserved:
I think the answer requires at least in part considering what the occupant of the presidency says in the aftermath of wrongdoing or rectification. On its face, if President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a war-time President I can do anything I want – I don’t need to consult any other branches – that is an impeachable offense. It’s more dangerous than Clinton’s lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages. It would set a precedent that … would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant.
But I think even they were too restrained. The right-thinking members of the right must make themselves heard on this issue; eloquent comparisons to loaded guns will, I’m afraid, get lost in the translation. Unlike their GOoPer doppelgangers, true conservatives are serious in the things they say and the sentiments they express; they also tend to know a lot more on the subjects at hand. They are actually capable of arguing their points and could truly reach people – if they can be heard above the RWNM.
And they must be; this has nothing whatsoever to do with partisanship and the dittoheads of the world need to understand that this is real. Which is why I was so happy to see Fein kickng it up a notch in an op-ed for the very conservative Washington Times yesterday. He lays out the finer points of the legal violations involved and pretty much shreds the administration’s defenses, saying “the Constitution’s separation of powers is too important to be discarded in the name of expediency.”
President Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the international communications of U.S. citizens in violation of the warrant requirement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, abominations.
…Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely against international terrorism, other than an unelaborated assertion he is not a dictator.
…Volumes of war powers nonsense have been assembled to defend Mr. Bush’s defiance of the legislative branch and claim of wartime omnipotence so long as terrorism persists, i.e., in perpetuity.
…President Bush preposterously argues the Sept. 14, 2001, congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines” were implicated in the September 11 attacks provided legal sanction for the indefinite NSA eavesdropping outside the aegis of FISA. But the FISA statute expressly limits emergency surveillances of citizens during wartime to 15 days, unless the president obtains congressional approval for an extension.
…Moreover, the White House has maintained Congress was not asked for a law authorizing the NSA eavesdropping because the legislature would have balked, not because the statute would have duplicated the war resolution.
Yes; they were too stupid/drunk with hubris to even lie about it. Why does it always come down to “criminal or incompetent” with this bunch? Not only did shrubya brazenly admit to breaking the law; he also vowed to continue doing so. Even Barron’s – a conservative stalwart owned by the WSJ – was appalled.
“the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers.
…Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation.
…It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.
…the president said: “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”
Wrong. If we don’t discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy — in the mirror.
But even they were too generous. As encouraging as these pieces are, none of these conservatives has yet called for impeachment directly. I wish they were all as vociferous as Paul Craig Roberts, who has been calling for outright impeachment since at least circa the Downing Street Memos. The current outrage is another in a long line of impeachable offenses as far as he’s concerned. He’s also delightfully scathing in his criticisms. After Katrina, he described this administration as “the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history.” With the suspension of habeus corpus, he characterized shrubya and the GOP as “bringing evil to the world and tyranny to America.” Now that man knows how to castigate!
wing tip to dkosser fabooj for the title.
Outstanding and highly recommended!
Excellent. Thanks for bringing together some conservative sources. This will be valuable when people return to work after vacation; what a way to counter talking points.
With this on everyone’s mind, Alito’s nomination might just fall by the wayside.
Allright, I have to recommend this just for the title alone.
heh…isn’t it great? fabooj came up with that as one of her efforts in the guerrilla marketing: impeach movement.
yes she did and it was funny as-well i dunno how funny it was-but I was lmao
You get a four for the title alone.
(Ugh–RIF! Reading is fundamental)
OK, give the 4 to fabooj for the title, but you still get a 4 and a big ol’ RECOMMENDED!
apparently, “it’s not just for blowjobs anymore” was a joint effort from kossacks fabooj and trickydick.
need to send these links to their House reps (since that’s where impeachment starts).
We’ve been complaining for what seems like ages that the Democrats need to get some cojones…well, let’s see if the House Republicans can get enough to go after their own Selected-in-Chief…
What a fantastic bumpersticker slogan.
Now there’s an idea. Who does it, cafe press, I believe.
true enough, but while you wait for your bumper stickers to arrive, you can print up a whole sheet of them on avery labels and stick ’em all over the place.
the guerrila marketing: impeach movement is hella fun!
check out my front porch!
Make your own. Here’s a link to the graphic:
That’s so beautiful, I could cry.
Everyone loves it. I even gave a sheet to a police officer the other day when I was out shooting a site. He specifically asked for (he saw the stickers I had pasted everywhere).
Good Work !!
I’ve got a lot of things I’m mulling over on this issue. Here’s a few:
JOHN DEAN
NOW FOR THE SCARY PART
NIXON ON THE LINCOLN LOOPHOLE
Sorry to plop all these segments in here. I’m looking forward to the investigations on this one. I’m also looking forward to Barbara Boxer’s response from four Constitutional scholars on the issue. As your diary title says, the debate has been elevated far above illicit sex in the White House.
i knew i’d missed a few, but damn…i had to finish the diary at some point! lol
regarding the lincoln loophole, be sure to check out the fein washington times piece:
And that was during a time of Civil War, right? Here’s some more:
CONSERVATIVE SCHOLARS ON IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE NSA
This is from a 1997 oped in the Houston Chronicle by Richard Ben-Viniste. This is just a partial list of crimes by RMN.
Shadows of Nixon
Why would anyone assume that Bush is a milder form of Nixon? Whereas RMN hired goons with Republican slush fund money, GWB instructed govt. employees in the Justice department to “make the illegal legal,” i.e. torture and the ‘plenary’ ‘unitary’ power of the Commander in Chief in the WOT and the US public paid for it.
The current case against the NYT who reported the story after sitting on it for a year should prove interesting. The person who “leaked” was a whistleblower reporting illegal domestic spying. Because of conflict of interest Gonzales must appoint a special prosecutor. Once that process has begun, there is no stopping the momentum…
Congress did not grant this power to wiretap Americans, nor was it their understanding of AUMF. It was Bush’s league of lawyers who came up with this. Primarily John Yoo, architect of the legality of torture… and the “plenary” power of the Commander In Chief. Bush’s War On Terror has no definition, no boundaries, and no end. Bush, via Yoo et al, is claiming that whatever a president does during wartime is legal and unquestionable.
Planting phony stories, buying off journalists, and gagging the NYT, (along with the previous management of Newsweek in the Qu’ran desecration incident) are just a beginning.
Because it is a soldier’s duty to disobey an illegal order. So, in my thinking, all govt. employees who have refused and have reported on the illegal orders of the Commander in Chief, should be granted immunity against prosecution. The investigation, if properly handled, will reveal illegalities on a scale we cannot begin to fathom.
***
(Once again, sorry to dump all this here, but I don’t know how to write a diary about it.)
What I want to know is. . .if the House and Senate refuse to do their jobs and impeach this lying abuser of power and disregarder of the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold, what does it mean for American Justice & Democracy?
Are they dead?
Is America then a de facto tyranny?
Is it time for revolution?
What are Americans willing to die for?
In 1776, there was no “fearless leader” for whom citizen soldiers laid down their lives, only ideas and principles stated in the Declaration of Independence to inspire them to take up arms against tyranny.
In 2006, there is a “fearless leader” who is the embodiment of tyranny, but where are the citizen soldiers who will rise up and stand unmovable in defense of the historical traditions of American Justice and Democracy — its Independence?
230 years — is that the life-span of the Great Experiment?
But the title of this diary is offensive.
Impreachment is not just for blowjobs? OMG who are you talking to?
i just do what my rice krispies tell me to.
What’s all this? I thought they just said snap, crackle, and pop!
Cedwyn’s post is excellent–very well researched. However, one impeachable act by our Commander In Chief was ignored: the fake terrorist attack that took place on September 11, 2001. If the perpetrators of this genocide are not exposed to the public, then it’s very likely we will have another fake terrorist attack when Bush and his cronies are backed up against the wall. Then they will suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and start rounding up people they don’t like (such as us). All of the discussion here will be for naught, a lot of words that float away like farts in the wind.
In my work as a cab driver I meet a lot of people, and I hear a lot of things. Recently a woman from New York City was a passenger in my taxi, and told me that she had been widowed in the 9/11 attacks. She told me that she was very angry, because most people are gullible enough to believe the official version of events about 9/11. Like me, she believed that the attacks were planned and carried out by the government. She told me she had two relatives with high ranks in the military, and both of them told her the government was behind the attacks. She said she was thinking about moving to another country, because of the apathy and ignorance here about the 9/11 fake terrorist attacks.
I simply do not understand why almost all of the people from one end of the political spectrum to the other are not opening their eyes to the true facts about 9/11. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that these attacks were not carried out in the manner that the Bush Administration and the Corporate Media would have us believe. Their conspiracy theory about 19 Arab hijackers with box cutters simply does not hold water. (Just for starters, six of the named hijackers turned up alive overseas, and there are no Arab or Arab-sounding names on the passenger manifests for the 4 flights that were allegedly hijacked.) I challenge anyone to read David Ray Griffin’s book, THE NEW PEARL HARBOR, and then come back to me and tell me that they still believe the government’s conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks.
The 9/11 attacks are the Root of All Evil inasfar as the current administration and their supporters, and their actions. They use this phony event as the rationale for every injustice they commit. Torture is a nasty thing to do, but we live in extraordinary times, right? Swarthy-skinned religious fanatics from other parts of the world attacked us on our own soil. Too bad about those civil liberties that went bye-bye when the Patriot Act was passed, but we are in great danger, are we not? Terrorists (definition, please?) are hiding under every rock, waiting to attack us at any minute. What, you don’t like these wars? Well, didn’t some Muslims kill 3000 of our citizens? Should we not go to the Middle East and work to dominate the whole region, so this dastardly act will never happen again?
We are a nation in denial. No one wants to believe that the Bush administration and the military would purposely commit genocide against over 3000+ US citizens on their own soil, as a means of furthering their ends. Even the most left-leaning people are saying, well, we know they’re bad, but they can’t be THAT bad.
The only way we can possibly prevent a second fake terrorist attack is to expose the first one.