Why Impeachment Works for Me

I believe Senator Russ Feingold is absolutely right to push to censure President Bush for his warrantless NSA domestic spying program.

But, the more information that comes out about the way the administration lied about the intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the stronger the argument for impeachment becomes.

Now, comes word, in this article, about the extensive cover-up that took place during 2004 to prevent the extent of the intelligence manipulation from coming to the attention of the press and the public.

For well over a year, polls have shown that a majority of Americans believe that President Bush should be impeached if it could be shown that he lied about the basis for going to war against Iraq.

With evidence of the cover-up growing, the proof of the lies (including the various memos and stories emerging from Britain) is evident. All we need now is for members of the House Judiciary Committee to demonstrate the political courage to live up to their oaths of office: to protect and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America.

The failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to provide any Constitutionally-mandated oversight of the actions of the Bush administration is grounds for the election of a Democratic majority in at least the House of Representatives.
This rubber-stamp, hold no-one accountable Republican Congress must go!

Russ Feingold's Principled Stance Frightens Both Parties

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold reiterated his call for his congressional colleagues to stand on constitutional principle and political courage on Thursday with a piece that ran in The Nation's TomPaine.com.

Senator Feingold send (too) many Senate Democrats scurrying for cover when he introduced his resolution to censure President Bush for violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by authorizing the National Security Agency to troll the communications of large numbers of American citizens without obtaining the approval of the FISA court that the FISA Act mandates.

On Thursday, Feingold invoked the record of Congressional Republicans who stood up to the lawlessness of President Richard Nixon during the early 1970s (some of the abuses Nixon faced impeachment for resulted in passage of the FISA Act) to challenge the current crop of Republicans to stand up for their country and their party against the abuses of Bush:

During the Watergate hearings, then-Senator Howard Baker, a Republican, showed tremendous courage, and a deep sense of Congress's duty to hold President Nixon accountable, when he asked that now-famous question: "What did the President know and when did he know it?" Baker was one of a handful of Republicans during the scandal who stood up to their party, and to the President. Today, as the President admits, even flaunts, his program to wiretap Americans on American soil without the warrants required by law, we need more courageous Republicans to stand up and check the President's power grab.

Feingold's reasoning is a mini-course in American Constitutional law, as it lays out in stark terms the dire challenge to America's constitutional order that the NSA spying represents:

Yet, as we face a President who thinks he is above the law, most Republicans are willing to cede enormous power to the executive branch. Their actions are not just short-sighted, they are a departure from one of the Republican Party's defining goals: limiting government power.

Some Republicans are defending the President's conduct as appropriate and arguing he should have free rein to continue his program, regardless of whether it is legal. Others seek to grant him expanded statutory powers so as to make his illegal conduct legal. But current law already allows a wiretap to be turned on immediately as long as the government goes to the court within 72 hours. The President has claimed an inherent authority to wiretap Americans on American soil without a warrant that he thinks allows him to break this law. So why would anyone think the President will comply with any new proposal? The constitutional system of separation of powers demands that we check a President who recklessly grabs for power and ignores the rule of law, not reward him – particularly when the law he breaks is designed to protect innocent Americans from intrusive government powers.

As many Republicans focus on defending the President, they are losing sight of what ceding these powers to the President now will mean for their own party down the road. Those expansive powers will rest with whoever sits in the Oval Office. Republicans who argue today that the President has the power to ignore a law passed by Congress are relinquishing authority not just to this Republican President, but to future presidents of any party. They are helping to render future members of their own party powerless to check an executive who claims expansive powers under the Constitution or a future Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution.

The fact that so many of the poll-watching, damp fingers in the wind, congressional Democrats have avoided Feingold and his resolution like the plague is proof positive that Feingold's censure motion is based on principle and not on politics. Nothing scares unprincipled politicians so much as a person who actually has principles and acts on them.

This is no stunt; Feingold is playing for keeps and everyone in Washington knows it. That's why so many people are so scared of him. And, why his words on the President and the implication of the Republican Party's lock-step defense of his power grab are so powerful:

The Republican effort to defend the President works against the party in the long run, and it also goes against the party's longstanding rhetoric about checking government power and strengthening individual freedoms. It's hardly in keeping with those values to allow Americans' communications to be monitored without a warrant, or to concentrate power in one branch of government. One of the best ways to limit government power is to ensure that each branch provides a check on the other two, but most Republicans in Congress today aren't checking the President's power or defending the judicial branch's right to do so – they are giving him a blank check to ignore the rule of law.

A party that prides itself on limiting government, and supporting individual freedom and the rule of law, should think twice before it allows any President to ignore the laws that Congress passes. By supporting the President now, Republicans are making it tougher for members of their own party to challenge the power of future presidents and departing from their own values in the process. That's a short-sighted strategy that won't serve either party, or the nation, in the long run. What would serve the nation, and support the rule of law, is for a few courageous Republicans to follow the example set during the Watergate scandal by standing up to a President of their own party, asking tough questions, and holding the President accountable for his abuse of power.

So, Senator Feingold's call for censure has majorities in both parties scared out of their wits. That's got to be a sign that he's right.

Feingold challenges fellow Democrats to 'Stand for something, or fall for anything'

Democratic Senator Russell Feingold's motion for Congress to censure President Bush for his illegal authorization of the National Security Agency to intercept communications of American citizens has sparked a heated debate in Washington, not least so among members of his own party!

The Washington Post has one story on the turmoil Feingold's proposal has caused among Democrats who are, apparently, can't quite grasp the notion of a member of their party in the Senate actually taking a stand based on principle.

Here's a bit of background on the Wisconsin Senator, from the Washington Post:

While other Democrats speak more colorfully, or show up more often on television, Feingold has carved a niche as one of the least-predictable senators. As he contemplates a presidential bid, Feingold is emerging as an anti-establishment maverick, a blend of Howard Dean, John McCain and the late Wisconsin progressive senator William Proxmire.

The Rhodes scholar and Harvard Law School graduate was elected at age 29 to the Wisconsin legislature, defeating an incumbent by a handful of votes. He turned back two better-known Democratic challengers in the 1992 Senate primary by ignoring their mudslinging and running humorous ads, including one in which he conducted a tour of his Madison area home, noting the closet space and saying, "Look, no skeletons."

Feingold has shown little of that humor in the Senate. He rarely engages in small talk with colleagues and is so unpredictable that fellow Democrats rarely seek his help in legislative battles or include him in public events. He irritated many colleagues in his long crusade for campaign finance reform, which Democrats feared would put them at a fundraising disadvantage; by his opposition to dropping all charges against President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings; and with his support for the confirmation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

But it is Feingold's national security views that have stirred the most controversy, vaulting him into the national spotlight. Before the censure bid, he was the first Senate Democrat to call for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, and he waged a solo filibuster against the renewal of the USA Patriot Act.

Feingold was the only member of the Senate to vote against passage of the original Patriot Act. Unlike his colleagues, he probably read the bill.

Democrats in the Senate are responding with typical courage.

A party not willing or able to defend, protect and uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States is not capable of leading this country. That applies to Republicans as well as Democrats.

UPDATE: Actually, William Greider, writing in The Nation, makes this case much better than I do.

'A Conscience With a Lens' and a Government in Search of a Conscience

The Washington Post has an appreciation of photographer/writer/movie director Gordon Parks, who died earlier this week at age 93.

The article tells the story of an assignment Parks got from LIFE magazine in 1968:

For its March 8, 1968, issue, Life gave Parks both pen and camera. He went to Chicago and stood on a street corner, checking the light. He held nothing back.

"Look at me and know that to destroy me is to destroy yourself," the photographer wrote in introducing his photo spread. "You are weary of the long hot summers. I am tired of the long hungered winters. We are not so far apart as it might seem. There is something about both of us that goes deeper than blood or black and white. . . . My children's needs are the same as your children's."

Think about those words as you read about what's being said about the ongoing community argument about whether to name a major street after Dr. Martin Luther King.

I am not saying that this issue has been handled in the most effective way by Lafayette Parish Council members Chris Williams and Louis Benjamin. But, politics and government are not just about personalities. Elected officials, by default, represent something larger than themselves. They represent the people of their districts. People who don't live in their district may or may not like them, but they are the elected representatives of those people.

Likewise, people cannot punish the elected representatives of citizens without punishing the citizens themselves.

Clearly, part of the dynamic of this discussion has been a decision by the white members of the Council and the Parish President to refuse to name a street after Dr. King as a means of punishing Williams and Benjamin for what those other leaders deem to be the personal failings of the two African American representatives on the council.

It sounds suspiciously like the white elected officials are saying that the real offense of Williams and Benjamin is that they "don't know their place" or some other relic of the Jim Crow era.

Regardless of whatever anyone thinks of Council members Williams and Benjamin it would be good to keep in mind that they are not just individuals, but the elected representatives of their districts.

Whatever cost the white elected leaders of this parish believe they are making Williams and Benjamin pay will be borne not just by those representatives and not just by their constituents. The cost of this intransigence and petty racism masquerading as a debate over council procedure will be to undermine whatever veneer of progressivism locals try to attach to the community through things like investments in technology.

Parks wrote: "Look at me and know that to destroy me is to destroy yourself." The other seven members of the Lafayette Parish Council and the Parish President should keep that thought in mind when this issue comes up again on March 21.

Delay Wins Tex. GOP Primary - How?

DeLay Wins Tex. GOP Primary
Former House Majority Leader Easily Beats Three Challengers
By Alicia A. CaldwellAssociated PressWednesday, March 8, 2006; A04
SUGAR LAND, Tex., March 7 -- Rep. Tom DeLay won the Republican nomination in his House reelection bid Tuesday, beating three challengers in his first election since he was indicted and forced to step aside as majority leader.
With 14 percent of the precincts reporting, DeLay had 10,005 votes, or 64 percent. His closest challenger, environmental lawyer Tom Campbell, had 4,049 votes, or 26 percent.
"I have always placed my faith in the voters, and today's vote shows they have placed their full faith in me," DeLay said in a statement. "Not only did they reject the politics of personal destruction, but they strongly rejected the candidates who used those Democrat tactics as their platform."
Associated Press writer Kelley Shannon in Austin contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Will on Bush Spying: 'Based on Monarchical Doctrine'

Conservative columnist George Will says the Bush administration is a threat to the republic, based on their arguments given to justify their total disregard of the law, the Congress and the courts in the use of the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept communications that it deemed suspect.

I hereby turn over the blog to Mr. Will:

The next time a president asks Congress to pass something akin to what Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 -- the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) -- the resulting legislation might be longer than Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Congress, remembering what is happening today, might stipulate all the statutes and constitutional understandings that it does not intend the act to repeal or supersede.

But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes -- going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration's stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president's inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance.

Administration supporters incoherently argue that the AUMF also authorized the NSA surveillance -- and that if the administration had asked, Congress would have refused to authorize it. The first assertion is implausible: None of the 518 legislators who voted for the AUMF has said that he or she then thought it contained the permissiveness the administration discerns in it. Did the administration, until the program became known two months ago? Or was the AUMF then seized upon as a justification? Equally implausible is the idea that in the months after Sept. 11, Congress would have refused to revise the 1978 law in ways that would authorize, with some supervision, NSA surveillance that, even in today's more contentious climate, most serious people consider conducive to national security.

Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.

The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as far-reaching as today's president says they are.

And if, as some administration supporters say, amending the 1978 act to meet today's exigencies would have given America's enemies dangerous information about our capabilities and intentions, surely FISA and the Patriot Act were both informative. Intelligence professionals reportedly say that the behavior of suspected terrorists has changed since Dec. 15, when the New York Times revealed the NSA surveillance. But surely America's enemies have assumed that our technologically sophisticated nation has been trying, in ways known and unknown, to eavesdrop on them.

Besides, terrorism is not the only new danger of this era. Another is the administration's argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is the "sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs." That non sequitur is refuted by the Constitution's plain language, which empowers Congress to ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate military forces, and make laws "necessary and proper" for the execution of all presidential powers . Those powers do not include deciding that a law -- FISA, for example -- is somehow exempted from the presidential duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

The administration, in which mere obduracy sometimes serves as political philosophy, pushes the limits of assertion while disdaining collaboration. This faux toughness is folly, given that the Supreme Court, when rejecting President Harry S Truman's claim that his inherent powers as commander in chief allowed him to seize steel mills during the Korean War, held that presidential authority is weakest when it clashes with Congress.

Immediately after Sept. 11, the president rightly did what he thought the emergency required, and rightly thought that the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication. Arguably he should have begun surveillance of domestic-to-domestic calls -- the kind the Sept. 11 terrorists made.

But 53 months later, Congress should make all necessary actions lawful by authorizing the president to take those actions, with suitable supervision. It should do so with language that does not stigmatize what he has been doing, but that implicitly refutes the doctrine that the authorization is superfluous.

The Republicans in the Senate may not be able be up to the task of reining in this administration, but Mr. Will appears committed to instructing them as to what their obligations are.

Congressional Probe of NSA Spying Is in Doubt

Senate Republicans, under intense pressure from the Bush administration, appear to be preparing to take a "don't ask, don't tell" approach to shredding of Constitutional rights.

The Washington Post reports that Bush/Cheney/Rove have been leaning heavily on moderate Republicans in their effort to prevent Congressional hearings on the domestic spying initiative the NSA undertook in apparent violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Ohio Republican Senator Mike DeWine, facing a tough re-election campaign this year, has come up with a novel solution: make the illegal activity legal. Here are the key paragraphs:

Senate intelligence committee member Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) said in an interview that he supports the NSA program and would oppose a congressional investigation. He said he is drafting legislation that would "specifically authorize this program" by excluding it from the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to consider government requests for wiretap warrants in anti-terrorist investigations.

The administration would be required to brief regularly a small, bipartisan panel drawn from the House and Senate intelligence committees, DeWine said, and the surveillance program would require congressional reauthorization after five years to remain in place.

So, Republicans want to legislate away the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. But, they might be willing to allow it to make a comeback in five years; or, maybe not.

There was a time, not very long ago, when conservatives claimed to be for small government and were strict constructionists when it came to the Constitution. Man, that seems like eons ago.

This quote indicates how radically things have changed:

We are confused and we have confused you with a double standard of morality. We try to keep alive a moral code for our individual conduct--"Don't cheat," "Promises are sacred." "Your word is your bond," "Serve your fellow men"--but at the same time, we accept double-dealing at government levels, and we've lost our capacity to get angry when decisions are not based on moral truth, but on political expediency. When small men are granted great rewards for political favors, we excuse it with the expression: "Well, that's politics."

. . . Time to look to the future. We've had enough talk--disruptive talk--in America of left and right, dividing us down the center. There is really no such choice facing us. The only choice we have is up or down--up, to the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down, to the deadly dullness of totalitarianism.

Do we still have the courage and the capacity to dream? If so, I wish you'd join me in a dream. Join me in a dream of a California whose government isn't characterized by political hacks and cronies and relatives--an administration that doesn't make its decisions based on political expediency but on moral truth. Together, let us find men to match our mountains. We can have a government administered by men and women who are appointed on the basis of ability and dedication--not as a reward for political favors. If we must have a double standard of morality, then let it be one, which demands more of those in government, not less.

Those 1966 words of Ronald Reagan deliver a stinging rebuke to those so-called conservatives in Washington who pay homage to his image, but savage his principles.