The Arrogance of Power

The Campaign for Impeachment:  Why We Should Support It

 

An Editorial Comment

 

by John L. Godwin

 

The profound disillusionment with government in the U.S. today is the direct result of a peculiar circumstance: the arrogance of the current administration in Washington has exposed the fallacies and hypocrisy of the prevailing conservative philosophy of government. But the media regime, locked as it is into the pursuit of corporate wealth and dependency upon advertising profits, either cannot or will not provide readers with sufficient exposure to a genuine alternative.

It should be no surprise therefore that the campaign for the impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President Chaney has gained little exposure in North Carolina. Most of the coverage has featured the arguments of opponents. As of mid-November almost a million online petitioners have voiced their support for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Chaney. Recent opinion polls provide further evidence of growing popular support for impeachment across the U.S., and in Vermont, the state Senate recently passed a resolution calling upon the House Judiciary Committee to consider the question of impeachment. But in North Carolina and along the Cape Fear, there is little apparent support even for a symbolic consideration of impeachment. In fact, many would find it surprising to discover that there is a serious campaign for the removal of the current regime under way due to its excesses and its violations of the law.

In has not always been this way in North Carolina. In the years between 1968 and 1974, when pursuit of the imperialist war in Vietnam pushed President Nixon to the lower depths in the criminal abuse of executive authority, North Carolina contributed much to the campaign for national reform. And the removal of Richard Nixon through the non-partisan efforts of constitutional reformers owed much to the efforts of N.C. Senator Sam Ervin, who served as chairman of the famous Watergate Committee.

Today the story is different.

The year 2000 and 2004 campaigns that began with the declarations of ultra patriots, church purificationists and the privatizers of business has lost the support of the American people and failed in its wider mission. The conservative idea that we needed a strong president to support limited government and old church values, while protecting American interests from the dangers of terrorism around the globe has morphed into something far more deadly and more sinister: a regime that has waged war on a fraudulent rationale, that has arrogantly asserted the inherent right of a chief executive to promote and encourage secrecy, torture, the violation of U.S. laws and the abrogation of the U.S. Constitution. President Bush has become the unthinkable—a president who asserts the doctrine of an imperial presidency that operates above and outside the law for reasons of state in the name of national security with little in the way of accountability to the American people.

Those opponents and critics of the campaign for impeachment who have based their arguments on partisan fears and political expediency should consider the following: the impeachment of George W. Bush and along with him Vice President Chaney, who is equally steeped in the same pattern of lawless and irresponsible conduct, is necessary precisely because it is our most fundamental principles, indeed the very basis of our civilization, that is at stake.

Here are the facts about the current regime that show the compelling need for an impeachment.

The current leaders of our country have thrust the U.S. into a needless and destructive war, waged under misleading circumstances and on the basis of false and unverifiable claims, compromising the peace, safety and security of the United States. As we have long known, President Bush in the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks at New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, took the nation to war on the basis of fraudulent claims that were asserted before U.S. Congress and the American people. These claims have been proven false and fraudulent on at least three counts. In his State of the Union message of 2003, President Bush charged that weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons, had been stockpiled in Iraq, posing a direct threat to the security of the U.S.. Bush also charged that Saddam Hussein continued to seek the materials and the means to produce nuclear weapons, by which he might launch an attack against the United States. And Bush charged that Saddam “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda” to whom he might provide one or more of his hidden weapons.

In his speech of March 17, 2003 on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush reiterated these claims, stating, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised...It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.”

It is now well-established that the statements by President Bush as given above were false, and that Bush knowingly made these claims in the face of information to the contrary. Such an abuse of power by an American president cannot be excused or overlooked, but fly to the heart of the role that is played by the chief executive according to the provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The deliberate misrepresen-tation of the facts and circumstances in the commitment of military forces in the course of war is a flagrant abuse of power under the terms of Article II Sections 3 & 4 of the Constitution. While granting specific powers to the president as commander and chief, that document which forms the basis and foundation of American law states clearly that the president has an affirmative duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed...” According to the terms of the Oath of Office, the President also has an affirmative duty to execute the laws of the U.S., and to the best of his ability “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

But the U.S. Constitution does not confer war-making powers upon the president. Article I Section 8 makes exclusive reservation of the power to declare war to the U.S. Congress, along with it the power “to raise and support armies.” By deliberately misrepresenting the terms of the war before Congress and the public on the eve of war, President Bush has shown not only that he is unworthy of office but also that he is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” under the provisions for impeachment, found also in Article II, Section 4.

The same Constitutional standard of conduct applies to the Vice President, who is subject to the rule of law and the requirements of office in the precise same manner as the president. Vice President Dick Chaney, whose public statements in the run-up to war in Iraq made the same fraudulent assertions on weapons of mass destruction, the relation of Iraq to al Qaeda, and the efforts of Saddam Hussein to acquire components for nuclear weapons, is therefore subject to impeachment on the same criterion as President Bush.

The failure to fulfill his oath of office, to exercise care in the enforcement of the laws by willfully misrepresenting the truth in deception of the U.S. Congress in the run-up to war in Iraq is not the only impeachable offense committed by President Bush.

In each of the following areas, President Bush has committed offenses under the terms of the Constitution:

· He has sustained, encouraged and promoted a program of illegal wiretapping in express violation of the terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires that no wiretapping shall be permitted without an order of the FISA Court, a special body created especially for the purpose of foreign surveillance cases.

· He has sought to perpetuate an unconstitutional doctrine: that the President of the United States by his executive authority has and should have the power to authorize such wiretapping without a warrant issued by a judge, as required under the existing laws of Congress and the sustaining decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

· By his statements and actions as commander and chief, President Bush has sustained and enabled a climate of license within U.S. military prisons at Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Graib and perhaps elsewhere through which numerous publicly documented cases of torture have occurred in violation of the terms of the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Convention, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1955, and the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996. By his failure to enforce the laws of the U.S. to prevent the use of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of such prisoners, President Bush has again committed an impeachable offense.

· In the months after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Chaney White House also became involved in the illegal effort to discredit and to punish former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson by publicly exposing his wife, Valeria Plame Wilson as a covert CIA operative. In a New York Times op-editorial published on July 6, 2003 Wilson wrote to challenge the claim put forward by President Bush and Vice President Chaney that Iraq sought to obtain uranium for the production of nuclear weapons. Wilson also charged that Bush and Chaney knowingly made fraudulent assertions in the run-up to war. In the course of an investigation in the Plame-Wilson case, the White House aide to Vice President Chaney, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was then indicted on October 28, 2005 on five counts of making false statements to federal investigators, was tried and ultimately convicted on March 8, 2007 on four counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. But within hours of the conviction, President Bush used his power as chief executive to commute Libby’s sentence and prevent the White House operative from serving time in prison. In the Plame-Wilson case, President Bush has abused his powers of office and may be guilty of an impeachable offense.

 

On these and on other possible counts, it is more than apparent that impeachment advocates in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, in the Senate of the state of Vermont, in city councils in the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina and elsewhere across the Unite States have made compelling arguments that deserve a public hearing. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has also drawn up articles of impeachment for Bush, Chaney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, arguing on the basis of twenty counts for the prosecution and removal of the Bush regime and the reassertion of constitutional principles of government.

Only the commitment to “business as usual” stands in the way of this prosecution. Only the subservience to partisan fears, to strategies for 2008, or to the prevailing status of numbers that tell us that impeachment cannot happen—that its principles and arguments therefore are irrelevant. Only blank surrender to the truism that would assert that somehow an investigation, prosecution, and removal of Bush, Chaney and Rice would, as argued in the statements of House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, effectively tie up the reigns of government and involve the nation in a dangerous enquiry that would uncover more truth than the nation can live with. What truth is now so dark, so threatening to the Democratic leadership that it cannot be exposed to the American people? Overly clever and ambitious Republicans in the House have even sought to exploit the question of impeachment by encouraging a proceeding in the House Judiciary Committee, which they apparently believe, will be injurious to the efforts of Democrats in the election of 2008.

Such partisan fears and self-interested strategies obscure one large and compelling fact about the question of impeachment. In his pursuit of an imperial presidency and the fraudulent war in Iraq, President Bush has not only compromised the best interests of the United States, he has violated the law, abrogated the Constitution, and would thereby establish the precedent of a presidential prerogative of absolute power under the aegis of national security in a so-called time of war—a war that this regime has manufactured.

It is time we recognized that regardless of partisan advantage, or the success or failure of legislation that may be of vital interest to the lives of millions of Americans, there can be no more vital or compelling principle than that of the Constitution itself. It is this principle that legislators in the current situation must grasp. While the threat to the U.S. posed by terrorism is today larger than ever, the threat that is posed to the very foundation of American civilization by the Bush regime should be of foremost concern. The rule of law, the separation of powers, the legislative supremacy of Congress in the making of law, and the subordination of the chief executive to civil authority in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, are the bedrock principles of our way of life. Toss them aside now and the next step will be the totalitarian state that relies foremost upon an arbitrary use of military and police force to accomplish its ends.

The impeachment and removal of a president and vice president are not easy remedies, but threaten an ordeal of civil and partisan discord that could result in damage far reaching to the interests of every U.S. citizen. But the abrogation of the Constitution is itself a destructive act, and the attempt to sustain an imperial presidency in the absence of traditional constraints represents a political ignorance and an irresponsibility in the practice of government far greater than the U.S. can afford to live with.

The time for an impeachment in the case of Bush v. U.S.A. is now.

 

John L. Godwin is editor and publisher of Carolina Civic Voice. He can be reached for comments at quillj@bellsouth.net.