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.

TO read more: http://greencommons.org/node/563