Thu, December 22, 2005 - 11:13 PM
Ok, I don't usually post stuff from other sources, but I'm going to post this because it is hopefully going to become a big deal once the government comes back from their holiday vacations.
Once again, Bush is saying, "Trust us, we can break the law but it is only to protect the country". How many times has this guy screwed the country since he stole office in 2000? Wake up people, the safety net for your civil rights, environmental concerns and any semblance of health care are gone, the rich have raided your surplus and Bush is using our soldiers to secure oil wells for his friends to get rich off of.
Oh, and Shekky, yea, this is long, but still not as long as your disaster post.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001736558
Published on Thursday, December 22, 2005 by Editor & Publisher
'Impeachment' Talk, Pro and Con, Appears in Media at Last
NEW YORK - Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the "I" word, or at least the "IO" phrase: impeach or impeachable offense.
The sudden outbreak of anger or candor-or, some might say, foolishness-has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House approved domestic spying program, with some conservatives joining in the shouting.
Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (known as "Hutch" to the president), observed that "some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment." Indeed such talk from legal experts was common in print or on cable news.
Newsweek online noted a "chorus" of impeachment chat, and its Washington reporter, Howard Fineman, declared that Bush opponents are "calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president's dictatorial perfidy. The 'I-word' is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year - much more."
When chief Washington Post pollster Richard Morin appeared for an online chat, a reader from Naperville, Ill., asked him why the Post hasn't polled on impeachment. "This question makes me mad," Morin replied. When a second participant made the same query, Morin fumed, "Getting madder." A third query brought the response: "Madder still."
Media Matters recently reported that a January 1998 Washington Post poll conducted just days after the first revelations of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky asked about impeachment.
A smattering of polls (some commissioned by partisan groups) has found considerable, if minority, support for impeachment. But Frank Newport, the director of the Gallup Poll, told E&P recently that he would only run a poll on the subject if the idea really started to gain mainstream political traction, and not until then. He noted that he had been besieged with emails calling for such a survey, but felt it was an "organized" action.
Still, he added, "we are reviewing the issue, we take our responsibility seriously and we will consider asking about it."
Conservative stalwart Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online takes the talk seriously enough to bother to poke fun at it, practically begging Bush foes to try to impeach him. "The main reason Bush's poll numbers would skyrocket if he were impeached," Goldberg wrote, "is that at the end of the day the American people will support what he did [with the spy program]."
And the folks at conservative blog RedState.org took issue with Fineman's prediction, noting that for "all his fearmongering" he "fails to note the essential point: the more the Dems mutter 'impeachment' in 2006, the more it helps the GOP, because it just further entrenches the notion that the Dems are out of touch, partisan, and not serious about national security."
But John Dean, who knows something about these matters, calls Bush "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." The American Civil Liberties Union threw more fat on the fire with a full-page ad in The New York Times on Thursday calling for a special counsel to look into the secret spy operations and urging Congress to get involved in considering the possible high crimes involved. And one of those thoroughly unscientific MSNBC online polls found about 88% backing the idea through late Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Washington Post blogger/columnist Dan Froomkin, declaring that "The 'I-word' is back," assembled an array of quotes on the subject. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), he pointed out, sent a letter this week to four unidentified presidential scholars, asking whether they think Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic spying amounted to an impeachable offense.
Todd Gillman wrote in the Dallas Morning News: "Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., suggested that Mr. Bush's actions could justify impeachment." And Froomkin cited Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance law, saying 'When the president admits that he violated federal law, that raises serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors."
When Washington Post pollster Richard Morin finally answered the "I" question in his online chat, he said, "We do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion -- witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls."
Morin complained that he and other pollsters have been the "target of a campaign organized by a Democratic Web site demanding that we ask a question about impeaching Bush in our polls." But Froomkin commented, "there's nothing wrong with asking the question."
The debate should only grow in 2006. Fineman predicted a dark year ahead:
"We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by each party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our security."
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www.americanprogressaction.org/si...asp
NATIONAL SECURITY - The Threat of an Unchecked Presidency
James Madison warned Thomas Jefferson, "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." The threat to the United States today is real. Yet, in recognition of this threat, Congress painstakingly produced a constitutionally-sound system that allows our government to monitor the activities of those who wish to do us harm, whether they be foreign agents or American citizens. A much different danger has been exposed by President Bush's warrantless spying program: an active hostility by one branch of government to the checks and balances designed to protect our nation's democracy. This hostility "is as pernicious and as damaging as any abuse or panic or misstep of the past," Washington Post defense analyst William Arkin writes. Americans have been asked to "pledge allegiance to a certain post-9/11 Order, abandon the rule of law, compromise our values, turn against our neighbors, enlist in a clash of civilizations, all in the name of defeating the terrorists.
We are being asked to destroy our country in order to save it." Our nation has not yet struck a perfect balance between ensuring our security and protecting our rights and liberties. But as the history sketched below demonstrates, the solution lies in more vigorous debate and more careful oversight, not less.
FLASHBACK: SPYING IN AMERICA, PRE-FISA: America has experienced an era of warrantless wiretapping before. "For much of the Cold War, foreign intelligence investigations (that is, both spying and spy-hunting on American soil) were not regulated by statute and operated at the initiative of Executive Branch agents without much congressional oversight." This largely unchecked power produced numerous abuses and crimes, and had a corrupting effect on our nation's intelligence agencies.
The FBI's COINTELPRO program "conducted domestic harassment of dissenters" and opponents of the Vietnam war "that included illegal wiretapping."
National heroes like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were targeted for surveillance by government agents. And heinous crimes were committed -- perhaps most notoriously, the point-blank extrajudicial killings of black activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a pre-dawn police raid facilitated by the FBI.
CONGRESS RESPONDS: THE CHURCH COMMISSION: In response to these abuses, the U.S. Senate launched the Church Committee Hearings, "the most comprehensive review of American intelligence activities ever conducted." The committee's 14 reports found "that covert action had been excessive, circumvented the democratic process, and had violated the Constitution."
Yesterday, former Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO), an original member of the committee, lamented "how soon we forget, how little we learn and how pervasive is the tendency to violate civil and constitutional liberties in the name of war. Virtually all of the reforms recommended by the Church Committee -- many of which were passed into law -- have been evaded, ignored or violated in the name of the 'war on terrorism.'" Just this week, news reports documented secret surveillance operations targeting "groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief," as well as opponents of the Iraq war.
FISA CREATED PRECISELY TO PREVENT WARRANTLESS SPYING ON AMERICANS: The legislative outcome of the Church Committee was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. In five different sections of the Act, Congress makes clear its intention "to prevent any future President from carrying out warrantless eavesdropping on Americans." In one section, Congress repealed the provision "the government had relied upon in claiming inherent presidential authority for warrantless wiretaps." In another, Congress "expressly made it a crime for government officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.'" In yet another, Congress stated explicitly that FISA and criminal wiretap laws "shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance...communications may be conducted." The bottom line: using FISA, Congress "enacted a comprehensive scheme governing all foreign intelligence wiretaps," drawing a clear line in the sand. Under the cloak of secrecy, and away from congressional scrutiny, President Bush has acted to subvert that line.
THE ADMINISTRATION'S DANGEROUS POWER GRAB: Vice President Cheney is "living in a time warp," says Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and Reagan administration official. "The great irony is Bush inherited the strongest presidency of anyone since Franklin Roosevelt, and Cheney acts as if he's still under the constraints of 1973 or 1974." Since taking office, President Bush, "with Cheney's encouragement, has taken what scholars call a more expansive view of his role than any commander in chief in decades," the Washington Post reports. This view is so "expansive" that, when the administration sought to violate FISA statutes, it simply disregarded the other branches of government. It bypassed the Legislative Branch by "briefing" an extremely select number of members of Congress, swearing them to secrecy, preventing them from seeking outside counsel and from objecting substantively to the program. The administration bypassed the Judicial Branch by relying exclusively on advice from administration lawyers, and it ignored Justice Jackson's famous concurrence in the Supreme Court case Youngstown, (cited by Chief Justice John Roberts during his confirmation hearings) which found that "when the president is acting contrary to congressional authority...the president's authority is at its lowest ebb." How telling that Vice President Cheney -- who on Tuesday criticized the laws enacted "around Watergate and Vietnam [that] served to erode the [president's] authority" -- is a prime mover behind both of their contemporary analogs, the CIA leak scandal and the Iraq war.
CONGRESS MUST ACT TO REASSERT ITS AUTHORITY: Several dangers are posed by such "expansive" executive powers. One, noted by Bruce Fein, is that the power grab is not fleeting, but rather sets a precedent that "would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant." Another is stated pointedly by former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick: "If you're John McCain and you just got Congress to agree to limits on interrogation techniques, why would you think that limits anything if the executive branch can ignore it by asserting its inherent authority?" As it stands, Congress "is part of the problem, willing participants in their own bondage." The solution is simple. Congress must reassert itself, and take up its vital oversight responsibilities with new vigor. Following the example of the Church Committee would be an excellent start.
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