(P) Let's see; instead of humming the song "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, my two front teeth, my two front teeth..." try humming "All I want for Christmas is an impeachment, an impeachment, an impeachment...".
Actually, more than one impeachment would be good. It's not every day the perpetrators of a serious crime admit to the crime, even going so far as to brag about continuing to do it in the future.
So it's come to this; apart from all of the impeachable offenses of the Administration, it really comes down to one simple question (which is a legitimate choice, by the way):
Do we want a president bound by the rule of law through the Constitution which he swore to preserve, protect, and defend?
Or, do we want a president whose authority as Commander in Chief elevates him (or her, eventually) beyond the law to act unhindered by the law?
My odds for impeachment have now surpassed the 50/50 mark.
3 comments:
Nate--Don't you have to commit a crime while in office to be impeached? Come on man, don't lose your objectivity just because you are a Bush hater.
Charles
Actually, I'm not sure exactly what you have to do to be impeached. Basically, you have to tick off the United States House of Representatives. It's sort of up to them what constitutes High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
But I will say again this Christmas morning that my position is not one of hatred for Bush (and I think that emotion plays too central a role on both the left and the right) but rather a rejection of the policies advocated by President Bush and his surrogates. Personally, I think he has already done enough to warrant articles of impeachment. But the NSA revelations are an interesting development because the President explicitly admitted authorizing the domestic spying and further claimed that he would do it again in the future. The defense wasn't that he followed the law; the defense was that as Commander in Chief he has the authority to ignore the law. That position goes to the heart of the American system.
One thing that I really like about the Bush Administration is that they put the big issues out there, which is something most of the Democratic leadership in Washington has been loathe to do for many many years. It's hard to find a much bigger issue than the level of authority We the People wish to grant to the Executive. I think most people are coming to recognize that Bush is subverting rather than protecting the Constitution, but that in itself is still a legitimate choice. We can choose to scrap the Constitution and instead place a leader above the law which he is authorized to enforce.
But if we choose not to abandon the Constitution, I think it's pretty clear the Administration must be removed from power by the Congress through the process of impeachment.
Let me also say this has nothing to do with the competence or importance of the NSA (I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but if I worked for the government, it would probably be the NSA. They are by far the coolest intelligence organization in the world). This is only about the power that the Executive has to tell people what to do, regardless of opposition from morality, politics, or the law.
Nate--I agree. Bush does things because they have to be done and I'm not sure he pays that much attention to the polls when doing them.
Having said that, we are at war. Not a neat, packaged, begin time/end time war, but a war that will probably still be around in one form or another well until the next administrations term.
I respect GW for taking measures that have protected this nation--even if he had to use executive power to do it. The fact that he put it out there shows me that he absolutley believed in the necessity of what he was doing.
I think you are picking nits if you don't factor into your impeachment equation what he did and why he did it.
Charles
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