Pelosi Needs To Put Impeachment On The Table

[IndianaGreen]

The underlying issue is that Speaker Pelosi is an enabler of the Bush dictatorship and those partisans among you that see everything through the prism of electoral politics are missing the point: Our Republic is in great peril, our Constitution is mortally wounded, our liberties are in jeopardy!

Concerned Americans across the political spectrum are raising the alarm, from Keith Olbermann and John Nichols, to Bruce Fein, John Dean, and Bob Barr. Pelosi has betrayed her oath of office, an oath in which she swore to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Pelosi must stop running interference for Bush's crime spree, and put impeachment on the table.

Published on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 by The San Francisco Chronicle

Pelosi Needs To Put Impeachment On The Table

by Bruce Fein

President Woodrow Wilson recanted his no-war pledge, President Franklin D. Roosevelt disowned his balanced budget promise and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., should learn from those examples. She should reconsider her “impeachment is off the table” pledge. As Ralph Waldo Emerson advised, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

The speaker’s reluctance is understandable. The president’s tenure expires on Jan. 20, 2009. An impeachment inquiry could embolden al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iraq’s insurgents and Iran’s nuclear-minded mullahs. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a majority of Republicans in Congress would attempt to portray the exercise as naked partisanship. Their enthusiasm for impeaching President Bill Clinton over lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky would be no deterrent.

But countervailing constitutional concerns are more compelling. Bush has crippled checks and balances and protections against government abuses. If these claims and practices are not repudiated, the precedents will lie around like loaded weapons, ready for use by any White House incumbent to intimidate rivals or to destroy the rule of law.

The president has reduced Congress to wallpaper. He has asserted executive privilege to foil the congressional power of investigation - the most important because sunshine is the best disinfectant for lawlessness or maladministration. Thus, Bush has claimed inherent constitutional power to prohibit former presidential adviser Karl Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, among others, from testifying about perjury, obstruction of justice or the politicization of law enforcement in conjunction with congressional scrutiny of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys. Even President Richard M. Nixon, whose signature creed was “if the president does it, it’s legal,” shied from such a monarch-like claim. When former White House counsel John Dean was implicating him in the Watergate coverup by reciting chapter and verse of Oval Office conversations before the Senate Watergate Committee, Nixon never insinuated he could silence his accuser. In contrast, Bush is claiming that secrecy, as opposed to transparency, is the constitutional rule for the executive branch. Government by the consent of the governed, however, requires the people to know what their government is doing to enable them to adjust their political loyalties accordingly.

Bush has hidden from Congress details of the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). It involves the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans based on the president’s say-so alone in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires judicial warrants. The president has declined to share the number of Americans targeted by the TSP, the intelligence yield, the earmarks employed to identify American targets, or other facts needed for Congress to evaluate its legality or advisability. Indeed, if it were not for an executive branch leak of the TSP to the New York Times, the spying would have been concealed forever with no public discussion or congressional hearings. Sister spying programs remain secret to this very moment.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/14/3170/

[acmavm]

1. She won't. None of them will ever end up doing anything. They think the

farce of getting on television and holding 'hearings' proves they're really doing something.

And again today I'll wonder to myself and anyone else who's curious, how's that 'twelve more days' thing going Senator Leahy? Heard from Gonzo lately? I doubt you will since with the passing of the FISA act his ass is pretty well covered.

[IndianaGreen]

3. "Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither"

As Benjamin Franklin as been quoted as saying, "those who would give up esential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Scott Horton
July 20, 2007

As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, on September 18, 1787, a certain Mrs. Powel shouted out to him: “Well, doctor, what have we got?,” and Franklin responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Like many of the Founding Fathers, he was intensely concerned that the democratic institutions they were crafting would deteriorate over time. In particular, they were concerned—and talked ceaselessly during the convention about the risk that, under pressures and exigencies of war, a tyrant would collapse their system into something closer to the monarchy that they had just defeated. Over the intervening 220 years, the republic has maintained itself, though not without close calls. And today, while we face what may be the gravest challenge in the nation’s history, our media will serve up the next chapter in the life of Paris Hilton.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000592

[Vidar]

2. Yes, she does, but there's more money in complity, cowardice & corruption.