>
> 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
>
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