Why Dick and Nancy Will Never be President via Impeachment (Dave Lindorff)

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Why Dick and Nancy Will Never be President via Impeachment

One argument I hear over and over when I talk about the need to impeach President Bush for high crimes against the Constitution is that it can never happen because "then we'd have Dick Cheney for president."

A second argument is that impeachment could never happen because even if Bush and Cheney were removed, it would mean Nancy Pelosi would become president, and Republicans would never allow this to happen.

Some who raise these issues may be genuinely horrified at the prospect of a Cheney presidency (though we really already have that), and may also be genuine in thinking that there could never be an impeachement that would change control of the White House from one party to the other. But I get the feeling that many of those who raise these objections to impeachment simply don't want to deal with impeaching the president. Certainly the Cheney canard has been quietly raised by many in the Democratic leadership to explain their shameful inaction in defense of the Constitution in the face of Bush's many grave crimes and abuses of power.

So let me knock these two bogus concerns down once and for all.

First Cheney. There is a precedent here. Richard Nixon, as he faced impeachment, also had what many said was a kind of impeachment insurance: Spiro Agnew. Agnew was in some ways like Cheney--a hard-right, money-grubbing, small-minded proto-fascist. He was also different in that Cheney is embedded in the highest reaches of the corporate petro-war machine, while Agnew was a political light-weight. Cheney also seems to have a Machevellian cleverness that Agnew never had. That said, both have in common that they are profoundly disliked by the vast majority of Americans--Cheney even more so than Agnew, who at least had a robust following among the yahoo, know-nothing crowd (that's pre-Yahoo yahoo usage). ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/

chance to appoint a new VPOTUS.

Edit: Although the article may be right that pressure could be brought to bear on him to resign as long as the GOP got to run in Boehner or someone like him, a Gerry Ford sort. It worked for Nixon, sort of.

that a "dave" scenario is more like it - he takes ill for the public to worry and so that he can be a martyr, yet he escapes to live in luxury in some undisclosed place to continue his manipulations and his enrichment while bankrupting and destroying others, never admitting to a wrong, never feeling the loss. I don't see him ever resigning or admitting to any mistake.

2. there is not enough time for impeachment and
3. there are not enough votes in the Senate to convict. So by all means impeach, then when Bush is not convicted he and the Republicans will call it a political ploy and millions of Americans will believe them.
Add to this that there is not enough of a will and desire by enough members of Congress for impeachment no matter how long and loudly the people here cry out for it. Reality is a bitch and life is not fair and as bad as it is or gets for Bushco, they will hold on by their fingernails if necessary until the end.

care if the lose their jobs. Trying them for their crimes against humanity is the only true course of action. Anything else is meaningless.

If we needed to uncover a cover-up, as was the case in Watergate, time for investigation would be required, but that is not the case here. Bush and Cheney are committing their crimes in plain sight. Impeachment was designed to be simple, swift, and certain.¹ There's more than enough in the public record for at least a half-dozen impeachments.² They just need one charge.

Staffers are more than capable of pulling together a set of draft articles. They are more than capable of gathering the materials, references, and testimony they need to make the case in a week or so of impeachment hearings.

Articles could be on their way to the Senate by Mother's Day.

Impeaching Bush and Cheney to rescue the Cosntitution is the first, absolutely mandatory step on the road to extracting our sons and daughters from Iraq. The House could make articles of impeachment a gift to the Mothers of the Nation.

Sure, poeple can argue that it won't happen, but to assert that it CAN'T happen is hogwash. When people realize it CAN happen, the likelihood that it will happen increases geometrically.

If the first set of articles they vote out doesn't lead to the resignation or removal of Bush and Cheney, they have plenty of time to vote out articles on one of the other high crimes. They could follow with a 3rd set if the 2nd fails to do the trick. Tragically, Bush and Cheney are waging war on the Constitution on so many fronts that they have plenty of high crimes to choose from.

If, despite their best efforts, they didn't manage to get convictions in the Senate or to force resignations before the end of the 110th Congress, so what? The 111th Congress could just introduce a new set and move to impeach "in absentia."

What feared length of time could possibly cause us to choose to surrender to fascism without a fight?


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1. GQ, March 2007
   The People v. Richard Cheney
   Wil S. Hylton
   
   When the Founding Fathers crafted the U.S. Constitution, they wanted to be sure that the president, vice president, and other ranking officials could be evicted more easily than the British monarchy. To ensure that the process would be swift and certain, they made it simple: Only two conditions must be met. First, a majority of the House of Representatives must agree on a set of charges; then, two-thirds of the Senate must agree to convict. After that, there is no legal wrangling, no appeal to a higher authority, no reversal on technical grounds. There is not even a limit on what the charges may be. As the Constitution describes it, the cause may be “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors,” but even these were left deliberately vague; as Gerald Ford once pointed out while still serving in the House of Representatives, the only real definition of an “impeachable offense” is “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
   
   http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5402">More. . .


2. For example:
   • ordering detainees in Guantanamo to be treated in ways they knew to be War Crimes (confirmed by the SCOTUS Hamdan ruling);
   • abducting, secretly holding, and torturing people in CIA-run prisons overseas (confirmed by the EU TDIP investigation);
   • abusing signing statements to declare their intent to violate our laws (just need a single example, such as the nullification of McCain's torture amendment, which passed the Senate with 90 votes);
   • terrorizing the nation with "mushroom clouds over our cities in 45 minutes" (the most colossal bomb threat in our history); or
   • violating FISA to spy on Americans (public statements from both Bush and Cheney confessing to this one).
   
   If Members of the House can't bring themselves to confront the grim reality that America has become a War Criminal nation that spies on it's own citizens, they could simply impeach Bush and Cheney because they are incapable of defending the nation. Their consistent lies (or as their defenders term them, "mistakes") have made any "evidence" that comes from any agency run by their appointees suspect. Their entire administration is therefore incapable of effectively motivating national or international response to a threat.

Has a familiar ring to it. Sanity is spreading fast.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/pat_k/12