Taking Back the Constitution--A Case for Impeaching George W. Bush
On Saturday, March 8, 2008, President George W. Bush vetoed a congressional bill that would have explicitly banned interrogation techniques like waterboarding. In doing so, Bush cemented his worthiness of impeachment.
The impeachment power allows Congress to keep the other two branches from grasping at powers that the Constitution gives to the Legislative Branch. Congress is described in Article I of the Constitution, and its structure was the chief issue in the Philadelphia Convention. Why? Because in a republic, it is to be the most important branch.
People commonly repeat the idea today that the federal government features three equal branches. This is an error. Congress is to be the most important branch. The Founders generally feared the power of the executive and assigned the traditional royal powers in foreign policy to Congress instead of the president. The courts were to be even weaker, the “least dangerous” branch.
Yet, over time, the three have come to be more equal. This is the result of Congress’s supine attitude toward the other branches’ overreaching. When federal courts legislate, Congress does nothing. When presidents and their subordinates—generals, cabinet officials, and others—ignore statutory law, refuse to comply with congressional demands for information, or flat-out lie to Congress, Congress does nothing.
Each instance of the other branches’ grabbing at congressional power is later cited by that branch as a precedent justifying additional arrogations. Over time, the sum of these usurpations has been to reduce Congress’s stature within the federal government, and to make the federal government more unaccountable.
Bush vetoed a law banning a type of torture. Federal law already bans torture in general, but Bush has declared that his administration will continue to reserve the right to inflict this treatment on captives.
Called to say whether waterboarding was torture, numerous of Bush’s subordinates have refused to answer. The Senate alternately has confirmed their nominations to high office anyway and has simply allowed them to refuse to answer.
Congress’s remedy to situations like this, in which the executive flouts clear laws, is to impeach the offenders. It might start in this instance with the attorney general, or it might go straight to the top.
England experienced a similar period of executive overreaching in the 17th century. Ultimately, Parliament responded with a series of impeachments. Those culminated in the House of Lords’ execution of the king’s foremost advisor. From then on, royal advisors were on notice that failure to comply with Parliament’s decisions would cost them their heads. This left the matter between Parliament and the king himself. In the end, Charles I paid for his refusal to submit to the authority of the law with his life, and the principle of the king’s subordination to the law was established.
The grounds for impeaching Bush extend beyond his simply refusing to be bound by the ban on torture. Bush has demonstrated contempt for Congress’s role in the constitutional system in other ways.
So, for example, George W. Bush has made extensive use of signing statements to redefine the meanings of statutes he dislikes. While his predecessors have used such statements, Bush has been especially aggressive in saying that he would read particular statutory language with which he disagreed in a way that was satisfactory to him. One is reminded of the way that Congress has allowed the Supreme Court to behave in a similar way; justices guilty of the same crime against the Constitution merit the treatment Bush merits.
Thirdly, Bush merits impeachment because of his ongoing policy of remaking Iraq, even by, as one prominent Bush supporter put it, a hundred-year occupation. He has no constitutional authority for this.
Congress has the sole constitutional power to declare war. Its substitute for doing this was a joint resolution empowering the president, in relevant part, to use force to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” Unless Iraq poses an ongoing threat to the national security of the United States, Bush no longer has constitutional authority to occupy Iraq. He should remove American troops from that country as soon as possible.
In furtherance of his Iraq policy, Bush has also endeavored to secure perpetual basing in Iraq; Congress should be involved in his efforts in this area, but it has not been. Bush can use the veto power to prevent Congress from legislating itself into this process. The only way for Congress to defend its constitutional role in this area, then, is via the impeachment power.
I do not arrive at this conclusion lightly. In fact, I twice voted for George W. Bush for president. The first time, I did so because I thought that Bush was more likely than Vice President Al Gore to appoint constitutionalist judges, limit federal taxing and spending, and pursue a noninterventionist foreign policy. At the time, I was discontented with Bill Clinton’s appointment of judges such as Ruth Ginsburg, sponsorship of the largest nominal tax increase in history, and intervention on the side of the Islamists in Bosnia and Kosovo. I mistrusted the Bush family, but it seemed clearly the preferable option.
The second time around, with incumbent Bush opposed by Sen. John Kerry, who had once promiscuously accused Vietnam veterans such as my father of war crimes, I had no problem in choosing Bush. It was clear by then that “Compassionate Conservatism” meant reckless spending, but Kerry had never done anything, either in foreign policy or in domestic, to please me.
Today, for the reasons described above, Bush should be removed from office. Congressional failure to employ the impeachment remedy against this lawless president will move us further from the original constitutional design toward executive dictatorship, as Bush’s behavior will constitute still more precedents for future presidential lawlessness.
Kevin R. C. Gutzman is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840, and, with Thomas E. Woods Jr., Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (forthcoming in July).
Comments
A quicker, more efficient method to stymie Bush would be to freeze his cash – cut off resources for his worldwide crusade to make the world safe for expensive suits. That won’t happen, either. Congress is in thrall to the same lobbies and power brokers - and Zionists - as the Administration. Congress is, as Nancy Pelosi says, “the leaders.” We the people are mesmerized peasants, tussling over whatever table scraps that aren’t scarfed up by the household pets.
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To not include the President’s coercion of Private Telecomm companies into illegal spying on American citizens is to miss the essential point of why this Executive, and potentially his successors are so dangerous. It is obvious now that the President does not respect the civil rights of the populace and that dissenters are considered to be “enemies”. In fact, given the recent statements of Vice President Cheney and their befuddled Press Secretary, the entire populace is “the enemy”. There is no citizenry, there is only a public and this public dines on a steady diet of contradictory propaganda.
The Executive is in charge of a vast bureaucracy that has inbred with the popular media and the think tanks and lobbyists of K Street. A faux debate is staged with an equally hidebound and bureaucratic Congress, one side claiming to have seen a wolf, the other a bear and the final outcome of this debate is a mythological beast. The denouement of this industrialized and highly staged factionalism is a stymied confusion.
Signing statements may usurp the power of the Congress or the independence of the Judiciary but the treatment of the population (there is no longer an effective citizenry) as the defacto “enemy” is the true punishing cost of this Administration. Before we impeach the President and many of his helpmates, we need to impeach our own complacence in the face of creeping tyranny.
It should be obvious to all that Garet Garrett’s “Revolution within the form” is no longer simply a rhetorical flourish. The FDR Administration and the Bush Administration are bookends in a library on how to Obliterate the U.S. Constitution one cut at a time. Defenders of both may cite numerous salutary individual efforts of both administrations but the fact remains that the choices made have created an enemy that is exactly as Pogo asserted: “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
We have enough challenges roaring down the turnpike of this chaotic world directly at us not to add our own government to the list of aggressors. If we are to sustain ourselves, we need to recognize that this paranoid Republic Of Fear....a lapsed Republic in fact, is our greatest enemy. Any trepidation we may harbor at the prospect of attacking the rot should be tempered by the awareness that we have already lost what we think we still have.
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To Mr. Sabin:
Yes. Perfect. Thank you!
To Mr. Gutzman:
Forrest is right. While Kerry’s betrayal of his comrades is repellant, voting for Bush instead of that droning opportunist was picking the worst of two evils. Who knows? Sometimes that can work, in a grim, horrific way - like choosing a bite from a black widow instead of a scorpion because the death throes will be shorter. But in 2004, we got four more years of national corrosion. Next time – throw that vote away on Nader. They don’t need any encouragement.
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I don’t claim that my charges against Bush are exhaustive. Come one, come all!
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The real reason that congress is not impeaching Bush is that it knows it is equally culpable.
We all know this war had nothing to do with WMD, any use of which would have provided the U.S. with grounds to turn Iraq sand to glass.
The real reson we went to war was in furtherance of the Strategy developed by the neocons and described in “project for a new american century”, and “a cleab break”.
In real goals were to secure oil, enable Israel to expand its borders, and demonstrate that the U.S. was prepared to destroy any country it chose to further its “interests” as defined by the needs of Israel and the need to keep feeding the military industrial complex. It was justified by a vulgar theory of military deficit keynsianism to sustain an economy that is now structurally hollow.
The cosequence has been the opposite of what was intended. The power, wealth, military as well as economic, and diplomatic leverage of the u.S. has been undermined, and instead of securing a new american century, the policies have secured a new chinese/multilateral world.
The charges should include congress, and should include treason, and cognitive impairment, war crimes, and working on behalf of the enemies of the U.S By following the delusions of Russian, German and Polish immigrants living in Tel Aviv, the U.S. establishment has set course for national suicide, and no one seems able to face this simple truth.
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“Lying to the American people may not be a criminal offense, but it is a breach of trust by the president. It is a ‘high crime or misdemeanor.’ As Hamilton suggested, the president could be impeached for acts that make him ‘unworthy of being any longer trusted,’ even if immune from ‘legal punishment.’”
The above quote is from Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The case against Bill Clinton. Impeachment doesn’t require that the president actually break the law, but that—through lies, corruption or depraved actions—loses the trust of the American people. Without question, this applies to President Bush who urged Americans to support a war in Iraq to rid the regime of dangerous weapons that threatened this country. If Dr. Stiglitz is accurate, then this a three trillion dollar lie. While we can cite other cases that warrant impeachment—wiretapping, torture, etc.—it is clear the president no longer holds the public trust and he must go.
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“England experienced a similar period of executive overreaching in the 17th century.”
That’s whig history. In the 17th c., the Stuarts were determined to protect the people against overreaching by a plutocratic Parliament.
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“This left the matter between Parliament and the king himself. In the end, Charles I paid for his refusal to submit to the authority of the law with his life....”
Parliament didn’t have the authority to make “law”. It merely had raw power, which it used to advance its interests at the expense of the king and the people.
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who is the only one/or one of the very few that votes “NO” on any bill or resolution that is not in line with the Constitution? I don’t think Ron Paul is in your “culpable” group. No MSM sources will talk about him, and he IS still running, and has ballot access in all states if I read it right.
If you want a true Jeffersonian Constitutionalist for our next President as I do, Please support Dr. Paul for 2008, the ONLY hope for America!! “Good night, and Good luck”.
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Twice in the past two years, I have called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. This has fallen on deaf ears in congress while the number of troop deaths continues to reach for the sky from an undeclared “war”, and our national debt has now exceeded Nine Trillion Dollars.
If we can’t change this irresponsible leadership, then each state needs to consider secession!
John McCain is NOT the answer; but the answer IS the other still-viable candidate, Dr. Ron Paul.
He’s still got my vote in November. How about yours?
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I overlooked mentioning in my last post, that a key reason for impeaching President Bush is his irresponsible and unconstitutional handling of our nation’s borders, his unconstitutional position with Mexico regarding illegal alien criminals, and his unconstitutional position regarding the “North American Union” concept. There are more than enough reasons to impeach him, his vice president, his cabinet and many Senators and Congressmen, and perhaps even some members of the Judiciary. With all this, time’s a’ wastin’!
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