With Bush and Cheney in office we've seen polling companies refuse to poll on impeachment because it's not in the news or expected to happen, at the same time that other polling companies find a majority in support of impeachment. Bush and Cheney have broken Nixon's and Truman's unpopularity records, and the Congress that refuses to impeach them is even more unpopular.
Is a failed impeachment necessarily a failure?
Not always. Nixon's resignation was a success for the rule of law. The effort to impeach Truman led to a reigning in of his abuses. Impeachment hearings even short of an impeachment vote in the House have a tremendous educational and political value.
I suspect the show of hands from Independents would give hope to the founders of this nation if they could see us. They tended to fear greatly the acquisition of power by political parties, which they called factions. They did not write political parties into the Constitution, and they did not expect impeachment to be understood as in any way partisan. We've come so far now, however, in the direction of the rise of Factions, that Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York who chairs the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, says that impeachments are no longer possible because of party loyalties. In other words, unless the Senate suddenly becomes two-thirds Democratic in order to make possible a conviction without a single Republican vote, Nadler won't bother to support even an impeachment inquiry in the House, although he did so in 2006. And nonprofit organizations routinely and mistakenly tell their members that they cannot advocate for impeachment because their tax status won't allow them to do partisan work. Of course we saw Republicans support the impeachment of Nixon, and Democrats support the impeachment or conviction of Clinton, but partisan madness today does not get distracted by mere facts. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party supports impeachment, but the first thing an impeachment advocate is called is partisan.
The founders of the country may be partly to blame for the rise of partisanship. They gave us a system modeled on the old British system, not the new one. They replaced a king with a president, but did not make the president the leader of the majority in the legislature. Instead the president is elected independently, and the election is winner-take-all. As more power shifts from the Congress to the president, this fact takes on greater importance, third parties are seen more than ever as spoilers, and two major parties begin to demand the loyalties that properly ought to belong to a branch of government. Most congress members today have almost no concern for what powers the Congress maintains as against the White House, but have extreme concern for whether the next president will be a Democrat or a Republican. This mindset facilitates the transferring of still more power from the legislature to the now misnamed executive, with the danger of dictatorship on the horizon.
The weakness of our system of government is winner-take-all presidential elections. The strength of it is the checks that each branch can impose on the others. But without impeachment, that all falls apart. So, the question arises: Can impeachment be taken out of the Constitution temporarily and be restored to it?
Please raise your hand again if you are a Republican or a Libertarian or a right-leaning independent.
Now please keep your hand up if you would like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to have the power to spy without warrants, to detain without charges, to torture, to murder, to mislead Congress and the nation into wars, to rewrite laws, and to violate laws with no consequences?
Now please put your hand back up if you oppose impeaching Cheney and Bush.
You guys want to have your cake and eat it too, and I don't think you can.
Here's another question: Can the impeachment process be abused and then be restored to its proper role?
Please raise your hand if you are a Democrat or a Green or a left-leaning Independent.
Now please keep it up if you think that the Bill Clinton impeachment was appropriate and that digging into a president's sex life is what the founders intended Congress to work on.
Now please put your hand back up if you oppose impeaching Cheney and Bush.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
