On Sat, 14 Jul 2007, cgrimes at rawbw.COM wrote:
> Impeachment, hey? Moyers has finally gotten around to Ramsey Clark's
> view four years ago:
Well, no, actually on two counts. One, Moyers isn't advocating this, Nichols and Fein are. And two -- and thank you for pointing this out -- one of the things that that makes this second wave of impeachment impetus so different from the first is precisely that FBOW it's not about the lead up to the Iraq War. It's about everything except that.
(Thirdly, I might point out in passing that Ramsey Clark's claim in your quote is that the president should have been impeached for breaches of *international* law, which legally is an extremely weird claim which on the face of it looks conjured up out of thin air.)
> There are a couple of practical problems with impeachment. The first is
> what to charge. I think the democratic leadership in the house has to
> put together a general prosecution plan in several areas of crimes that
> prosecution lawyers agree on a good likelihood of pushing discovery in
> order to unearth concrete evidence.
None of this is true for Nichols' and Fine's approach, which is part of why I recommend the show as so full of new ideas and interpretations I haven't seen before.
(BTW, it is now all posted on youtube, broken up into 5 parts, starting with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxyFeRjt3Rs&mode=related&search= -- the other 4 parts are next to it in the "related" box. And FWIW, the transcript is here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07132007/transcript4.html -- although it includes an intro and outro beyond the actual three-person interview which is excerpted on youtube)
Nichols and Fine have a very different take on impeachment from what you're talking about here -- and what you're talking about here completely coincides exactly with what I thought impeachment was about before I saw the show. Accordinging to them, impeachment is not a criminal procedure. If someone gets convicted, they don't go to jail -- they just go home to comfortable retirement. It's not even about blackening someone's name. And, properly conceived, it's not even about removing someone from office. It's about policing and restricting the powers of the office itself.
Impeachment, in the their view is Congress's power to stop the office of the president from expanding into something that is above the law (which is reflected in the title Nichols's book: Impeachment: the Founders' Cure for Royalism).
According to them, the current froth of popular impeachment sentiment is precisely about this, about the president and vice president thinking and acting like their office place them above the law. And when this happens, impeachment is the cure. As far as they're concerned, its purpose would perfectly realized if the President and Vice President, facing impeachment hearing would simply say "Whoa. We've thought this over and you're right. The president doesn't have the power to suspend habeas corpus without Congressional approval. He doesn't have the power to kidnap people out of allied countries. He doesn't have the power to spy on the citizenry without any oversight. He doesn't have the power to authorize torture. We're going to stop all those things." Then there would be no reason to continue the hearings -- the office would have been reconstrained, the precedents would have been removed, simply by a retraction of claims.
Of course that would only happen in an alternate universe. But their point is that while impeachment has been misconceived as both a criminal procedure and a means to remove a president outside of elections (a sort of jury-rigged vote of no-confidence), the real purpose was as a central check and balance. As Nichols says, there's no mention in the constitution of political parties or primaries or corporations. But they mention impeachment six times. It is, in their view, the constitution's remedy for presidential overreaching, for the president acting and portraying himself (which is just as important) as being above the law -- as beyond the power of Congress and the constitution and the people to stop him.
It is, in short, exactly the antidote to Bush's and Cheney's lawlessness.
So they say. BTW, if it isn't clear, I'm still an agnostic on this. I haven't even convinced myself that impeachment is a worthwhile idea. But I do think the view presented in this discussion is interesting and important and certainly novel enough to be worth discussing. FBOW, it's not the same discussion you've heard about impeachment in the past, of that I can assure you.
Anyway, it's on PBS at 7pm tonight EST in New York; check your local listings.
> The other problem if you look at recent polling on Gonzales and the related
> Scooter Libby affair you will see only a third of the public followed these
> investigations, and about half were not convinced or thought there was no
> crime there.
FWIW, it seems to be the pardon of Libby is a large part of what's caused this sudden recent spike in impeachment sentiment among the public. That plus the now widely established idea that Cheney is real president, and the real source of the idea that the presidency is above the law, and that hearings on lawlessness would be even more about what's he's done than about Bush.
Michael