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gramarye wrotemyliftkk wrote The idea of simply running out the clock on Bush is akin to Congress playing prevent defense and hoping the Executive branch doesn't run up the malfesance score any more than they already have. In contrast, even the Dems didn't let FDR get away with his court-packing scheme towards the end of his presidency.The court-packing scheme was proposed in 1937. FDR died in office in 1944, more than seven years later. The court packing never occurred, but the threat was enough to change the outlook of a critical swing vote on the Court, and New Deal legislation suffered none of the serious setbacks that it had previously suffered at the high court after that scheme. You have a strange idea of what "not letting a president from one's own party get away with something" means.
Also, impeachment trials take so long that Bush would be out of office before a resolution could be reached, anyway; running out the clock is what you're stuck with now whether you want it or not. You can fantasize about Bush being arrested by Belgian or Dutch police somewhere and carted off to the Hague for a show trial there, if that makes you happy.
Gram, you fall into the same partisan trap talking about impeachment. I don't want administration officials grabbed by foreign governments, I want them dealt with by American politicians. You can't disprove my over-arching argument, which is that the founders included impeachment as a political solution to the exact problem of executive criminal overreach, but instead prop up excuse after excuse over why it should be off the table. The founders didn't take it off the table, they put it in the Constitution.
The excuses against impeachment as an valid political solution usually run as follows:
1. It is perceived to hurt one or more political parties in power, and should be avoided to avoid upsetting some perceived balance of political power in elections foretold. That opinion is almost entirely concocted from media spinning of political horseraces and reporting that's more concerned with who's winning elections than who's committing criminal acts while governing.
2. It is perceived to be a waste of resources. Really, compared with spending 10b a month in Iraq, crying about some resource waste over what would very likley be a legimate inquiry into well-documented potential criminal activity is going a bit overboard. Again, this opinion is mostly based on the perception of the Clinton impeachment inquiry, which in the end, turned up the only criminal activity of lying over a BJ. I'd lay 20 easy that any inquiry into the Bush administration comes up with far more than that.
3. Time will run out on Bush's presidency, so let's just leave it alone. There's two fatal flaws with this argument. The first one is it assumes that Bush sits around doing nothing for the remainder of his presidency, a fallacy we know is untrue and easily dismissed. Even though the MSM doesn't bother to report on it, his political appointees are still doing the busy work of trying to placate every last corporate special interest before he gets out the door, deregulating as they go. Second, let's assume by some McMiracle, Obama loses, we will not only have aceded to Bush & Co. suppositions of Unitary Executive Theory as a sacrosanct governing methodology, but by leaving them unchallenged we will also have installed a president, who by any account can hardly contain his anger at opponents, whether of his own party or the other. Mix this with foreign competitors and nuclear weapons, and some people might see this as a problem. I'm not even juiced at Obama potentially being in power an this theory still being an acceptable governing principle and would like is dismantled before then.
4. There's no crimes to be found, otherwise he'd already be impeached. This excuse belies any understanding of how impeachment actually occurs and the current political environment where White House staffers are on record fearful of the "nightmare scenario of the appointment of a special prosecutor with broad powers" (in their terms). Given the number of IG reports that have alluded to potential crimes committed within the executive branch, it's safe to say where there's smoke billowing, there's likely fire, but when one branch of government claims Executive Priviledge over the ants on the WH lawn, it's a bit tough to get information from people. You do have to get to the special prosecutor first, prior to impeachment, but it's conceivable that any one of the 3 DoJ probes going on now could result in one.
5. Some people hated Bush from the dawn of time, so no serious person talks about impeachment. I was actually ambivalent about Bush for a long time, but as the increasing mountain of evidence piles up, the question becomes, is the damage he and his crowd are doing to the American political system worth the struggle to fight against it? Being intimately experienced with other political systems, including very repressive, very corrupt ones, and some attempting to recover from decades of serious corruption, I'd say that the threshold has been crossed.
All said, there's really little substantive argument about why impeachment shouldn't be a legitimate option on the governance table. Solely politically motivated impeachments are highly unlikely to succeed, so fearing some sort of retributional trend is fearing the unfounded. However ignoring potential crimes based on a serioulsy legally flawed theory of governing only continues to allow determined people to continue to rot out the heart of our represenetational system of governance.
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