When Democrats won the House last fall, incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said that impeachment would be "off the table" in the coming Congress.
The time has come to re-visit and reverse that course, in the case of the fired prosecutors.
Here’s where we sit. Congressional investigators believe Bush purged U.S. Attorneys based on political fealty, that he sought to politicize the administration of justice as is done in autocratic states worldwide.
The investigators can’t get to the bottom of this charge because Bush won’t let key aides testify under oath, and because he has withheld White House e-mail traffic.
They can subpoena those officials, but the President will resist. Congress can pass a resolution declaring these officials to be in contempt of Congress. And you know who is supposed to enforce that? A U.S. Attorney appointed by President Bush. That’s called a conflict of interest.
Success for Bush in all this would make future Congressional oversight
of the executive impossible. A Democratic President could do precisely
this to a Republican Congress. On any issue. Even, yes, a blowjob.
When two branches of government reach an impasse of this type the
Congress has the ultimate authority, and responsibility, to remove that
President from office. Impeachment is the Constitutional equivalent of
a nuclear weapon and only one branch, the Congress, has such a weapon.
All the claims being made by this President are precisely those claims
Richard Nixon made during Watergate. Fortunately, in that case, both
Republicans and Democrats were ultimately willing to move forward, and
had he not resigned it was plain the Senate would have convicted him.
That’s where we stand. If the House is unwilling to consider
impeachment, then not only does Bush win but Nixon wins, and the idea
that "it’s not illegal if the President does it" becomes enshrined in
law as a precedent, just as President Lyndon Johnson enshrined the idea
that a majority vote authorizing force is the same as the
Constitution’s two-thirds vote declaring war.
This is the kind of thing that defines a generational crisis. It’s
whether the government, or the people, have the guts to fight for their
rights under the Constitution, or whether the system will fail, leaving
us with anarchy and jungle law. This has defined the crisis every
previous generation found itself in, and every previous generation
found a way through.
Will this generation? Or will it accept the unitary executive, the
President as Dictator, and the Constitution as just a piece of
parchment?
Nancy Pelosi can answer this question very clearly, by telling the
media that the question of impeachment, which was taken off the table
on Iraq, is now back on the table, and that the Congress is willing to
use its authority under the Constitution.
