Impeachment: Remedy for Royalism

A Forward Thinking Stratagem for National Renewal by Byron De Lear

Well it’s going to take guts.

It’s going to take political guts for the Democrats to step up to the plate.

Guts to restore Habeas Corpus, guts to say torture’s ‘off the table’ and guts to say that da Prez ain’t King.

It’s going to take guts to impeach, but that’s exactly what must be done because torture shouldn’t be on the table, we shouldn’t be in Iraq and all TEN of our sacrosanct Bill of Rights should still be the Supreme Law of the land, don’t you think?

These backdoor schemes watering down our freedoms and blowing out any sense of real accountability (read: Presidential signing statements) must be halted, blunted, blocked and staved off to save those few basic defining characteristics that can still potentially keep our nascent Republic from speedily following in the footsteps of the Empires of the past – rising and falling in totalitarian rivers of blood and violent swaths of destruction.

Impeachment stops this madness, and legally defines the Imperial reactions conducted since 9/11 as simply being un-American.

IMPEACHMENT SURVIVES OUR REPUBLIC

“The Genius of Impeachment” is a book by John Nichols, Washington Correspondent for The Nation, from whom the other night I enjoyed witnessing a lively discussion with the inimitable Gore Vidal.

In surprise attendance was anti-war Goldstar mother Cindy Sheehan who addressed the gathering sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America.

In his presentation, Nichols revealed the history of impeachment detailing the many different incidents of when this tyranny-busting mechanism has been utilized and the reasons for its existence.

From Nichols’ “The Genius of Impeachment”,

“(James) Madison, in the letter that accompanied the draft of the Constitution he dispatched to Jefferson on October 24, 1787, reflected on the necessity of the document’s mechanism for “an easy & effectual removal by impeachment” of presidents who abused the powers accorded them by the convention.”

Constitutional father James Madison also cautions against potential abuses of power coming down from a President too eager to make war in his “Letters of Helvidius”:

“…the power to declare war, including the power of judging of the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature; that the executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or not cause for declaring war…”, and as Nichols reports, “Because, “the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war,” Madison explained it was essential that the Constitution make available tools “to disarm this propensity.”

Our beloved President Abraham Lincoln, while a Congressman from Illinois was opposed to President Polk’s war with Mexico in 1848, and introduced his “spot resolutions” eventually teaming up with former President John Quincy Adams attempting to formally sanction and censure Polk for misleading the nation into war.

Abraham Lincoln’s perspective on the Mexican-American war, how that war was sold, and the powers of a “war President” are particularly instructive today.

In a letter to his business partner Lincoln wrote the following,

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of the British invading us” but he will say to you “be silent; I see it, if you don’t.” The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

OFF THE TABLE

My familiarity with the ‘I’ word began with my calling for George Bush and Dick Cheney’s impeachment in the 2006 United States Green Party State of the Union rebuttal as part of my run for the US House of Representatives.

Like many Americans, after Democrats had won a decisive victory in November 2006, I was shocked to hear new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi concede to Bush et al that impeachment was “off the table”.

Off the table -- as if Watergate and Monica Lewinsky were worse abuses of power than what the Bush Administration has foisted upon the American people for the last six years.

Everybody has their laundry list of impeachable offences, but for me the last straw to break my reticence to impeach were the President’s justifications given for torture as a legitimate reaction to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Starts to make you feel like America is not America anymore.

Sanctioning the use of torture whether through legal remixes of vaunted Geneva Conventions, whisking kidnapees off to secret foreign-based chambers of horror or the freak show macabre of Abu Graib and GITMO are grotesquely anti-democratic, inhumane and directly antithetical to core American principles.

Assuredly, an abuse of power by the President putting our troops and citizens in greater risk of having more and more torture and inhumane treatment turned on them.

Coming up with legal arguments to shut down Geneva Conventions, diminish civil liberties and do away with Habeas Corpus ring out across the land as a call to action that if we fail to answer, will report and sound as a mourning death knell for our Republic.

President Bush took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, but instead he sent in a cabal of legal wizards casting spells comprised of legalese summoning illusions to obfuscate their dangerous deconstructionist and outright violations of our sacred Constitution.

This is why we must impeach – to shirk the duty of protecting and defending the Constitution against insidious attempts to nullify the most binding and basic rights that we as Americans enjoy, is to be unfaithful to what we hold dear: that America is not supposed to torture, not supposed to spy unwarrantedly and not supposed to be a Colonial power nor Empire.

Our Government has been recklessly pursuing these kinds of policies for quite some time now – probably most specifically in a legally sanctioned manner since the National Security Act of 1947 creating a myriad of intelligence agencies and the current Department of Defense. With CIA covert operations, removed from any thorough scrutiny by our representatives in Congress, we started down a very unconstitutional path.

PATH TOWARDS TYRANNY

From the Constitution, Article 1 Section 9 Clause 7 says, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.”

To quote Chalmers Johnson in his book “The Sorrows of Empire”,

“This article is the one that empowers the Congress and makes the United States a democracy. It guarantees that the people’s representatives will know what the state apparatus is actually doing and it authorizes full disclosure of its activities. It has not been applied to the Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency since their creation.”

Today, it is not enough to conduct convert illegal operations, now we have laws being passed negating Constitutional protections all out in the open, paving the way for totalitarianism, most certainly what our uniquely American Constitutional checks and balances were designed to prevent.

The time is now to halt these trends and in a very legal sense define for posterity what are unacceptable behaviors -- no matter what the threat.

Putting the source code for our nation at risk and making much of the Bill of Rights superfluous is good cause for impeachment.

The torture policies awash in Bush’s anti-Constitutional bilge must be actively opposed via impeachment, as they are most definitely high crimes of treachery and tyranny.

Unlike most proponents of impeachment, instead of making the case for, consider what is risked if we don’t impeach -- and prognosticate to when another possible terrorist attack occurs in America.

GIULIANI CAKEWALK

Many Democrats to date have been relatively unassertive and passive in stopping the war in Iraq. In my Congressional run, I ran against a Democrat so unassertive he actually supported Bush’s policies in Iraq much like Sen. Joe Lieberman, despite what his constituents fervently felt about ending the war.

This desire for the Democrats in Congress to not shake things up stems from one part fear of being seen as ‘weak on terror’, and one part ‘give Bush more rope’ as he digs a deeper ditch by relentlessly continuing to pursue a failed Iraq War policy.

This ‘give Bush more rope’ strategy is not political leadership but rather gamesmanship – gaming the two-party teeter-totter while more Americans die in combat and preventing a real political solution from taking shape in Iraq.

The great tragedy with this passive-aggressive strategy being conducted by the Democrats is that the nightmare in Iraq is deliberately perpetuated for electoral purposes, namely, winning the Whitehouse in ’08.

I say “deliberately perpetuated”, because as members of the US House, Democrats have their hand on the fiscal spigot, they’re just not willing to turn it off.

It may be possible for the leading Democratic Presidential candidates to backpedal into the Whitehouse in 2008, but there are some foreseeable circumstances in which this wait and see attitude will not be successful. For instance, a new domestic terror attack spiraling Americans into a reactionary and fearful mindset before the election could upgrade the Republican portfolio in the eleventh hour sending Rudolf Giuliani on a cakewalk into the Whitehouse as ‘Mr. 9/11’.

The unfortunate electoral turn of events after a significant domestic terror strike can be avoided if anticipated.

If impeachment were used, the over-reaching abuses of power that the Bush Administration have argued were appropriate responses to 9/11, would be in a very legal sense paraded point by point ad nauseum in front of the world to see, forever framing Bush’s Global War on Terror as a tyrannical and ultimately self-defeating foreign policy for America.

Impeachment would put the Bush Administration’s overreaching and quasi-Imperial worldview ‘off the table’.

A socially just palette of governance refutes Bush’s worldview --an authoritarian worldview justifying a myriad of felonious acts and edicts revolving around the restriction of basic liberties at home, seizing unprecedented powers to spy on Americans, and to wage undeclared wars abroad wielding such terror tactics as cluster bombs, police-state occupations, and torture.

Impeachable offences totally eclipsing any thing Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton had ever done.

Impeachment is a tool. It is a tool to be used against Royalism; tyranny.

It is a method by which our nation renews itself, and checks any Executive who fancies himself or herself to be King.

It is a normal thing; it is a necessary check and balance to fend off tyranny, and avoiding it like the plague speaks of some unseen corruption, some untoward collusion amongst the powers that be in DC.

I have a nightmare vision of these torture policies blowing back onto a captured American soldier or civilian as retribution for the well documented cases of inhumane treatment the Bush Administration has allowed to occur.

These direct assaults on democracy, integrity, jurisprudence and the future safety of our fighting forces are necessarily impeachable offences to frame for future generations what is simply unacceptable behavior by the Commander-in-Chief.

HILLARY, WAR OR PEACE?

Hillary Clinton has surprised me twice in her Presidential bid so far – once pleasantly and once, not-so-pleasant. The first time was in January when she unequivocally denounced Bush’s war in Iraq and headily proclaimed that if he doesn’t end this war, “as your President I will end this war come January 2009.”

I don’t think I blinked for a whole minute.

With that statement, I saw the pitching of an anti-war tent fully embodying the kind of solid pledge any anti-war candidate could ever make. I should have looked twice because the tent never made it up the pole.

In a recent interview, Hillary pulled back into a more ‘nuanced’ position on Iraq, mildly postulating perhaps it would be okay to, say, leave 75,000 troops in theatre. For a second time she left me blinkless.

What would drive her to do such a thing? An obvious flip-flop?

The one reason I can think of is that Hillary is deeply afraid of being perceived as light on terror – and then watching as a nightmare scenario unfolds beginning with a domestic terror strike stateside, and then seeing the energized and reactive voters knee-jerk Giuliani into the White House.

This is why I think Hillary would never like to be thought of as a peace candidate, just the Commander-in-Chief, strong on defense.

What America needs is new leadership and a different vision, not the bland mélange of political posturing and triangulation – this is why instead of fantasizing about back-pedaling into the White House, the Democratic leadership needs to press forward with impeachment.

Impeachment would stave off any Giuliani cakewalk as ‘Mr. 911’ because it would in a very real legal sense define all of Bush’s draconian responses to 9/11, as contrary to the Spirit upon which the Framers framed.

Thomas Jefferson: “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectively checked and restrained by the others.”

When the malady of Imperialism appears, impeachment is the remedy.

SIGN PLEDGE TO IMPEACH:

http://thefifthbranch.blogspot.com/2006/04/plan-and-pledge.html

BLOGGER IMPEACHMENT COALITION: http://impeachbushcoalition.blogspot.com/

GET INVOLVED!: http://www.impeachpac.org/

Byron De Lear’s email: byron@globalpeacesolution.org

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