[Dialogue] Impeachment: The Cure For Executive Excess

Fri Feb 10 11:28:57 EST 2006

AlterNet

Impeachment: The Cure For Executive Excess

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on February 9, 2006, Printed on February 10, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/32041/

Once upon a time, in the middle of a nasty constitutional crisis in
Washington, a most unlikely hero emerged -- a lawyer from one of Texas'
notoriously discriminated-against racial minorities.

Think how lucky we were. It is one of the most famous sentences in all of
American rhetoric: "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete,
it is total."

But what catches the eye today is the sentence that followed that famous
declaration, the sentence that makes one so ashamed for Al Gonzales. Barbara
Jordan's great, deep voice brought the impeachment hearings against Richard
Nixon to an awed silence when she vowed, "And I am not going to sit here and
be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of
the Constitution."

Thirty years ago, this state could produce Barbara Jordan -- and now we send
that pathetic pipsqueak Al Gonzales. Enough to provoke a wailing cry of "O
tempera, O mores!" even from the depths of Lubbock.

As a New York Times editorial succinctly put it, Attorney General Gonzales'
Judiciary Committee appearance was a "daylong display of cynical
hair-splitting, obfuscation, disinformation and stonewalling."

How fortunate that Republicans running the committee did not insist the
chief law enforcement officer of the United States take an oath before
testifying. God forbid that he should actually be held to the truth. I
realize it's a cliche for those of us who remember the Beach Boys to mourn
the days when giants roamed the Earth and all was on a grander and finer
scale. But I knew Barbara Jordan, and I know Al Gonzales, and it is damned
depressing -- he's too lightweight to even be a mediocrity.

It seems to me the trumpery excuse for a hearing raised graver issues than
those of 30 years ago.

Gonzales kept trying to frame the issue as a question of whether or not a
domestic spying program without warrants is illegal -- in fact, it is
against the law. Gonzales maintained that the law is superseded by some
unwritten constitutional power due the president during time of war and
further that Congress had authorized warrantless spying when giving the
president the authority to invade Afghanistan. Strange, so few who voted for
invading Afghanistan recall having warrantless spying in mind.

One problem of legal logic is to "define war." We have not been attacked by
another nation -- in fact, we were clearly the aggressors against Iraq. We
were attacked by a private group of ideological zealots led by a Saudi
millionaire. This war -- against no nation, flag or territory -- can
presumably last indefinitely, like our wars against drugs and crime.

Barbara Jordan observed: 

"[Impeachment] is designed to 'bridle' the executive if he engages in
excesses.. The Framers confined in the Congress the power, if need be, to
remove the president in order to strike a delicate balance between a
president swollen with power and grown tyrannical, and preservation of the
independence of the executive.. 'A president is impeachable if he attempts
to subvert the Constitution.' "

Nixon was accused, among other things, of misuse of the CIA. I highly
recommend James Risen's new book, State of War:
<http://alternet.bookswelike.net/isbn/0743270665>  The Secret History of the
CIA and the Bush Administration. Risen is the New York Times reporter who
broke the story of the National Security Agency spying scandal.

Thomas Powers, an authority on American intelligence, reviewed the Risen
book for The New York Review of Books and notes: "If the Constitution
forbids a president anything, it forbids war on his say-so, and if it
insists on anything, it insists that presidents are not above the law. In
plain terms, this means that presidents cannot enact laws on their own, or
ignore laws that have been enacted by Congress.. "

In public life, as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no. We are
living with the consequences of the inability to say no to the president's
war of choice with Iraq, and we shall soon see how Congress and the courts
will respond to the latest challenge from the White House -- the claim by
President Bush that he has the right to ignore FISA's prohibition of
government intrusion on the private communications of Americans without a
court order and his repeated statements that he intends to go right on doing
it.

The time is coming when someone will have to say no. Sadly, I have a vision
of the impeachment panel, and I see Tom DeLay in the seat once occupied by
the great Barbara Jordan. 

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings. 

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