|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Crime & Police : Elections & Legislation : Government Secrecy : Political-Economy : Regime |
|
'Impeachment' Talk, Pro and Con, Appears in Media at Last |
Current rating: 0 |
by Editor & Publisher
(No verified email address) |
22 Dec 2005
|
John Dean, who knows something about these matters, calls Bush "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." The American Civil Liberties Union threw more fat on the fire with a full-page ad in The New York Times on Thursday calling for a special counsel to look into the secret spy operations and urging Congress to get involved in considering the possible high crimes involved. And one of those thoroughly unscientific MSNBC online polls found about 88% backing the idea through late Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Washington Post blogger/columnist Dan Froomkin, declared that “The ‘I-word’ is back..." |
NEW YORK - Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the “I” word, or at least the “IO” phrase: impeach or impeachable offense.
The sudden outbreak of anger or candor—or, some might say, foolishness—has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House approved domestic spying program, with some conservatives joining in the shouting.
Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (known as “Hutch” to the president), observed that "some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.” Indeed such talk from legal experts was common in print or on cable news.
Newsweek online noted a “chorus” of impeachment chat, and its Washington reporter, Howard Fineman, declared that Bush opponents are “calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The ‘I-word’ is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.”
When chief Washington Post pollster Richard Morin appeared for an online chat, a reader from Naperville, Ill., asked him why the Post hasn't polled on impeachment. "This question makes me mad," Morin replied. When a second participant made the same query, Morin fumed, "Getting madder." A third query brought the response: "Madder still."
Media Matters recently reported that a January 1998 Washington Post poll conducted just days after the first revelations of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky asked about impeachment.
A smattering of polls (some commissioned by partisan groups) has found considerable, if minority, support for impeachment. But Frank Newport, the director of the Gallup Poll, told E&P recently that he would only run a poll on the subject if the idea really started to gain mainstream political traction, and not until then. He noted that he had been besieged with emails calling for such a survey, but felt it was an "organized" action.
Still, he added, "we are reviewing the issue, we take our responsibility seriously and we will consider asking about it."
Conservative stalwart Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online takes the talk seriously enough to bother to poke fun at it, practically begging Bush foes to try to impeach him. "The main reason Bush's poll numbers would skyrocket if he were impeached,” Goldberg wrote, “is that at the end of the day the American people will support what he did [with the spy program].”
And the folks at conservative blog RedState.org took issue with Fineman’s prediction, noting that for “all his fearmongering” he “fails to note the essential point: the more the Dems mutter 'impeachment' in 2006, the more it helps the GOP, because it just further entrenches the notion that the Dems are out of touch, partisan, and not serious about national security."
But John Dean, who knows something about these matters, calls Bush "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." The American Civil Liberties Union threw more fat on the fire with a full-page ad in The New York Times on Thursday calling for a special counsel to look into the secret spy operations and urging Congress to get involved in considering the possible high crimes involved. And one of those thoroughly unscientific MSNBC online polls found about 88% backing the idea through late Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Washington Post blogger/columnist Dan Froomkin, declaring that “The ‘I-word’ is back," assembled an array of quotes on the subject. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), he pointed out, sent a letter this week to four unidentified presidential scholars, asking whether they think Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic spying amounted to an impeachable offense.
Todd Gillman wrote in the Dallas Morning News: "Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., suggested that Mr. Bush's actions could justify impeachment.” And Froomkin cited Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance law, saying 'When the president admits that he violated federal law, that raises serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
When Washington Post pollster Richard Morin finally answered the "I" question in his online chat, he said, "We do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion -- witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls."
Morin complained that he and other pollsters have been the "target of a campaign organized by a Democratic Web site demanding that we ask a question about impeaching Bush in our polls." But Froomkin commented, “there's nothing wrong with asking the question.”
The debate should only grow in 2006. Fineman predicted a dark year ahead: “We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by each party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our security.”
© 2005 VNU eMedia Inc.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
|
Note to Mr. Bush: The U.S. is Not a Monarchy |
by Joseph L. Galloway
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Dec 2005
|
Our forefathers created a system of government built on checks and balances that they envisioned would protect a free people from abuses of their privacy, their property and their liberty at the hands of anyone, especially anyone in public office.
They never intended for an imperial presidency to rise above the legislative and judicial branches of government, for they had their fill of kings and emperors who ruled with absolute power in the old world. They knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
They wanted none of this, and wrote a Constitution and Bill of Rights to enshrine the protections they knew were needed to keep Americans free and democracy healthy.
They crafted a system of government rooted in the principle that citizens have rights and presidents violate those rights at their own peril.
Let us review the bidding as the dark year 2005 fades:
President Bush admits that he secretly ordered the government to eavesdrop on American citizens, without recourse to the established legal methods of doing that. He declares that he had and has the right to do so. Says who? Well, he says so, and Vice President Cheney says so, and his attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, says so too.
Some legal scholars beg to differ, arguing that the president has violated federal law and has opened himself to impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. They contend that he trampled the Constitution in a bid to expand the powers of the executive branch and conduct the war on terrorism.
This is the same president, the same administration, that under cover of the same wartime power grab declared their right to detain prisoners outside the court system in secret foreign prisons and the right to use inhumane and degrading measures in interrogating those prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
In ordering the National Security Agency to intercept phone and e-mail traffic of American citizens, members of the administration chose not to avail themselves of a secret federal court established nearly 30 years ago to provide the government the means to secretly investigate anyone believed to have ties to foreign governments or movements that threaten the United States.
They say it is too cumbersome and slow to seek warrants from that court - even though the court has granted such warrants in more than 17,400 cases and only rejected them four times. They say they must move more swiftly - even though the law permits them to eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant that is routinely and quickly granted.
Some suggest that the Bush administration's real reason for cutting the secret court out of the loop is that some of the information they are basing the secret wiretaps on was gotten through torture. The court warned early on that it would not permit information gotten through extra-legal or illegal methods to pervert the American court system.
Congress passed the law creating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court precisely because another president, Richard Nixon, bent the intelligence agencies and the entire government to his will in pursuing those he considered his enemies. If you made the Nixon enemies list, then your phones were tapped, your comings and goings watched, your tax returns audited.
How big a leap is it from ignoring the rule of law in pursuing foreign enemies to pursuing and punishing domestic enemies, those Americans who for political reasons or reasons of principle oppose your aims?
The president and his vice president and his attorney general are saying, essentially, trust us. We won't use our extra-legal powers against ordinary Americans. We just want to protect you from further terrorist attacks. Trust us. We are honorable men who have nothing but your well being at heart.
Sorry. That won't cut it. They have all the legal tools any president needs already on the books for our protection. Congress makes the laws. The judiciary interprets them. The president and all the rest of us live by them.
George W. Bush is not the emperor of America or the king of the 50 states of the union. He, like us, must live by the rule of law. He is bound by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the end, he works for us.
As Ben Franklin wrote more than two centuries ago: "Those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security."
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young."
2005 Knight-Ridder
http://www.realcities.com |
|
Bush and Wiretaps: Congress, Citizens, This Means War |
by Jay Bookman
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Dec 2005
|
In asserting his right to ignore the law, President Bush has slapped Congress right across the face and told them they better like it.
Congress can now mutter "Yes, sir" and cower in its corner like a whipped dog, as it has for most of the past five years, or it can fight back to defend its institutional authority. Either choice will mark a turning point in U.S. history.
At immediate issue is the president's decision four years ago to allow the National Security Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, to spy on phone conversations and e-mails of U.S. civilians without court-approved warrants. President Bush insists the program is legal, but it's important to understand what he means by that term.
Bush and his advisers do not claim that his actions are legal because they abide by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA; they quite clearly violate that law. Instead, they claim his actions are legal because as commander in chief, he can violate the law if he chooses and still be acting legally.
It is, in other words, his royal prerogative.
That is an extraordinary assertion of executive power, particularly since the president claims this authority will last "so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens," which is pretty much forever.
Conservatives rushing to support Bush's position out of personal loyalty might want to think about that. If allowed to stand, the president's claim will fundamentally alter the balance of power not just between Congress and the presidency, but between our government and its citizens, and it will do so regardless of who occupies the Oval Office in the future.
Bush grounds his argument on need, claiming that current law gives him too little leeway to fight the war on terror effectively. That argument has at least four basic flaws.
First, it ought to alarm anyone who is truly serious about preserving personal liberty in the face of government power. "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom," British statesman William Pitt warned in 1783. "It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
Second, the claim that Bush has had to violate FISA to protect our security is false. Under FISA, the government has explicit authority to begin wiretapping whenever it deems necessary, without seeking prior approval from a judge. The law merely requires the executive to seek after-the-fact approval from a top-secret special court within 72 hours. Since 1978 that FISA court has rejected just five of 18,748 warrants sought by the government.
Third, even if the law were defective, as Bush claims, no president has the power to make that determination on his own. This is a democracy; if there's a problem with a law, the Constitution gives us a process for fixing it. In this case, FISA was a carefully calibrated, thoroughly debated effort to find the right balance between security and liberty; Bush does not have the authority to simply toss that work out the window because he disagrees with it. That's the power of a dictator, not of a president.
Fourth, and most fundamentally, this argument of necessity calls into question who we have become as a people.
More than 160,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq this holiday season, putting their lives, bodies, souls and futures on the line. Thousands more are on duty in Afghanistan. And while those of us here at home celebrate their bravery, for the most part we are not required to share in it. We let them do the fighting and dying for us; we do the applauding and burying.
We do, however, run an infinitesimally small chance of falling victim to a terrorist attack. It happened once; it could certainly happen again, and we should do everything within reason to prevent a recurrence.
But it does not seem too much to ask that in facing down that danger, we demonstrate just a fraction of the bravery and resolution that our soldiers show. Osama bin Laden, after all, is not Adolf Hitler or imperial Japan or the Soviet Union.
If we civilians quake at the comparatively minor danger that he and his followers pose, if we rush to offer up our civil liberties in hopes of a little more safety, we prove ourselves unworthy of the sacrifice that our men and women in uniform are prepared to make.
Yes, the president has told us we should be fearful, encouraging us to compromise not just our freedom but our constitutional system of government. But if this is still the country we claim it to be, we will tell him no.
Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.
2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com |
|
