"If, therefore, any right to any form of private property or freedom no longer serves a good social purpose, it must go." [L. T. Hobhouse]
ian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
> Sent: Saturday, October 30, 1999 2:23 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Well-Regulated Militias, and More
>
>
> Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> >How do rights that facilitate popular
> >struggle demobilize it? Because we are lulled into false
> >consciousness?
>
> Because there's such reverence for the text - and the wisdom of The
> Framers that inheres mystically in it - people are absolved from any
> sort of self-organized political action. That's reinforced by the
> fragmented, rivalrous structure of government in the U.S., which has
> been quite consciously designed to depoliticize politics.
>
> For a pure example of delusional liberal constitutionalism, see the
> attached. What the hell is wrong with "partisan" removal of a
> president, anyway?
>
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> The Nation - February 15, 1999
>
> What Works: The Constitution
> JONATHAN SCHELL
>
> In most respects, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton--now
> destined to go on for yet more weeks--is different from the
> proceedings against President Richard Nixon a quarter-century ago.
> Nixon was accused of abuses of the power of his office. You had to be
> President to bomb Cambodia secretly, to use the IRS to harass your
> political enemies or to ask the CIA to squelch an investigation by
> the FBI. Clinton, on the other hand, is accused of violations of law
> in his individual capacity. It is within the power of almost anyone
> to fool around at the office, to invite a colleague to dissemble
> about the affair in court or to ask a friend to do the lover in
> question a favor.
>
> The historical circumstances were different, too. In the immediate
> background was the cold war, in whose name the presidency had
> accumulated powers that Nixon used to break the law. The question
> before the country$was whether to embrace this "imperial" presidency
> or to restore the constitutional balance, and it chose the latter.
> Today, by contrast, one would be hard put to name any large public
> controversy that is going to be settled one way or the other by the
> impeachment trial. If anything, the trial has created fresh issues
> (mostly regarding abuse of the impeachment power itself) rather than
> resolved existing ones.
>
> In at least one respect, however, the two impeachment proceedings are
> similar. Both, in their different ways, illumine the wisdom,
> shrewdness and almost uncanny prescience of the Framers of the
> Constitution of the United States. In recent years this magazine has
> run a series of articles titled "What Works." The Constitution is the
> prince of things that have worked--in its case for 210 years. To sing
> the praises of the Constitution at this moment is, I know, no
> startling thing to do. Those accusing the President in the Senate
> chamber as well as those defending him have been doing likewise for
> several weeks now. One side wants Clinton out, and the other side
> wants him to stay, but both want what they want in the name of the
> Constitution . In fact, this general reverence for the
> document--sometimes called America's civil religion--may in truth be
> as important as its particular provisions. Agreement about any code
> of conduct, whether this is the US Constitution, Islamic Sharia,
> Confucian odes or last week's astrological charts, can be a boon to a
> country. A king who's respected is worth more than a splendid
> constitution that's ignored. (Stalin's Constitution of 1936--an
> exemplary document, guaranteeing every imaginable human right--comes
> to mind.)
>
> In the events at hand, though, it is also undeniably the provisions
> of the document that shine. In The Federalist Papers and other
> writings of that day, the abstract thoughts of the writers often read
> like descriptions of the events unfolding before our eyes. For
> example, we instantly recognize today's Republican Party in Alexander
> Hamilton's warning that "the most conspicuous characters" in
> impeachment will "be too often the leaders, or the tools of the most
> cunning or the most numerous faction; and on this account can hardly
> be expected to possess the requisite neutrality towards those, whose
> conduct may be the subject of scrutiny."
>
> Therefore the Constitution established certain breakwaters against
> the tide. One was the provision that two political bodies had to be
> involved--the House as accuser, the Senate as court. In our case,
> though, both bodies are under the control of one party. Not to worry,
> though--the Framers placed one final obstacle in the way of the
> President's removal: the requirement of a two-thirds majority in the
> Senate. "The division ... between the two branches of the
> legislature," Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers, "assigning to
> one the right of accusing, to the other the right of judging; avoids
> the inconvenience of making the same persons both accusers and
> judges; and guards against the danger of persecution from the
> prevalency of a factious spirit in either of those branches. As the
> concurrence of two-thirds of the senate will be requisite to a
> condemnation, the security to innocence, from this additional
> circumstance, will be as complete as itself can desire." And this
> provision today stands in the way of a purely partisan removal of the
> President, just as Hamilton had anticipated.
>
> Such prophetic refinement is especially striking in the impeachment
> clause, which is probably the loosest cannon on the constitutional
> deck. It is the final, desperate remedy when the normal, everyday
> operations of the Constitution have all failed and the Republic is on
> the edge of catastrophe. Not surprisingly, then, it runs counter to
> other principles on which the Constitution is based. The separation
> of powers, for example, is one of the Constitution 's very
> foundations; yet impeachment clearly breaks it down. The separation
> of jury and judge is basic to our judicial system, but in the persons
> of the senators at the trial it is erased. The scene before us every
> day in the Senate chamber--in which the President is in the dock;
> Congressmen have trooped over from their own House to the Senate; the
> senators have been rebaptized as hybrid juror-judges; and the Chief
> Justice of the United States has left his co-equal lair across from
> the Capitol to preside--is a sort of monstrosity from the
> separation-of-powers point of view. Here, owing to a contemplated
> great national emergency (missing in today's case), the separated
> powers seem, as in time of war, to have fused primitively into one.
>
> Yet this crude power, too, has been tempered and regulated. In
> effect, a separation of powers was re-created by assigning
> impeachment to the two bodies and requiring the two-thirds vote. For
> some months, a majority of the public, according to most observers,
> has been paying little attention to the spectacle in Washington. The
> government is in uproar, but they are calm. They go about their daily
> lives, which they find more important than impeachment. Let us
> imagine, though, that in some lax moment at the Constitutional
> Convention the Framers had omitted to require the two-thirds
> majority. Today, the President would be in clear danger of removal.
> Immediately, we must suppose, public indifference would end and
> people would angrily take sides in a battle whose stakes are huge and
> menacing. But none of this is happening. The two-thirds rule--a great
> shield held out by the Framers across a gulf of two centuries to
> shelter us--is in place, and we are undisturbed.
>