This has not been a good week for the Bush regime. Mr. Libby is guilty, Mr. Gonzales is trying to spin a political scandal in the Justice Department into a public relations failure and the administration has been caught short-changing wounded veterans of the neoconservatives' private war.
An exact comparison between the impeachment of Nixon and a potential impeachment of Bush is woefully inappropriate. If it were, we could say that we are somewhere between the point of the Haldeman-Ehrlichman resignations (April 73), when impeachment was first mentioned (by Sam Donaldson of ABC News, IIRC) and the Saturday Night Massacre (October 73), when impeachment resolutions were introduced.
In 1973, the Democrats were willing to lead public opinion on impeachment. Until the Saturday Night Massacre, there was little public enthusiasm for impeachment. However, during the period from then until July 74, when the House Judiciary Committee recommended three articles of impeachment, public opinion for impeachment snowballed in the face of changing White House explanations for events and continued stonewalling. Just what did Ron Ziegler mean by "All previous statements are inoperative"?
The Republicans in 1998, with the complicity of major news outlets, were also willing to lead public opinion on impeachment, but failed miserably. As a result of saber rattling about impeachment, they lost seats in Congressional elections that historically are won by the party opposing the President. That was a red light that they ran through when they recommended articles of impeachment against President Clinton.
Perhaps as a result of the Clinton impeachment, the Democratic leadership wants to be led by public opinion on this issue. They want absolutely no perception that this is a mere political vendetta against Bush.
The main deference between the Nixon impeachment of 1974 and the Clinton impeachment of 1998-99 is that few really believed that there was a constitutional crisis involved in Mr. Clinton's case. Indeed, if any body should have been removed from office for abuse of power, it was Ken Starr, the partisan and unprofessional special prosecutor who went far out of his way at taxpayers' expense to bring impeachment charges against Clinton based on a tacky tryst in an investigation about a shady real estate scheme in which Clinton and his wife lost money. On the other hand, Nixon was clearly involved in a violation of criminal statute by covering up evidence against key re-election officials, including a former Attorney General, in the Watergate break in and evidence of White House involvement in the illegal operations of the Plumbers Unit and other abuses of presidential power, such as using the CIA for domestic spying and tasking the IRS to target Nixon's opponents. This was a real constitutional crisis.
It is for those of us who are impeachment hawks to persuade the public that a real constitutional crisis exists and that the highest officials in the executive branch are responsible for bringing it about. Specifically, we charge that:
- Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Dr. Rice (then NSA chief) and Mr. Rumsfeld (then Secretary of Defense), with the assistance from various aides, including then-Undersecretaries of Defense Wolfowitz and Feith, conspired to manipulate intelligence reports and present a false case for war against Iraq;
- Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, with the assistance of other aides in the OVP, including Mr. Libby who has now been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about the OVP's part in the case to a federal grand jury and to the FBI, conspired to reveal the identity of an under cover CIA operative as part of a political vendetta against the operative's husband, who had made public details of how facts which he had gathered showing that Iraq did not attempt to buy uranium from Niger were ignored or misrepresented in Mr. Bush's SOTU message of 2003;
- Mr. Bush conspired with his then-chief White Counsel, Mr. Gonzales, and others, including then-White House attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to justify the use of torture of persons in the custody of the United States in violation of the Convention against Torture, to which the United States is a party, or to rendition such persons to another country where they will be tortured, also in violation of the Convention against Torture, and to otherwise deny the rights of such persons of the due process of law in violation of the Third or Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1948, to which the United States is a party;
- Mr. Bush directed the NSA to spy on American citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution;
- Mr. Bush conspired with Mr. Gonzales, in his present capacity as Attorney General, to dismiss eight US Attorneys without cause and replace them with political hacks;
- Mr. Bush failed to execute the laws in his response to natural disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the late Summer of 2005, causing many unnecessary deaths and damage to property;
- Mr. Bush has failed to execute the laws in allowing medical facilities under the Department of Defense and the Veterans' Administration to become dilapidated and provide substandard care to wounded veterans of the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan;
- Mr. Bush, in callous disregard for the safety of members of the armed forces of the United States, sent them to combat duty in a war of aggression against Iraq in violation of the United Nations Charter, of which the United States is a party, and without proper safety equipment for their persons and vehicles; and
- Mr. Bush is presently conspiring with other top administration officers, including Mr. Cheney and, in her present capacity as Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, to provoke war with Iran without congressional authorization or debate.
This, too, is a constitutional crisis and one far deeper and more serious than even Watergate.
The Watergate crimes were dealt with sufficiently by recommending articles of impeachment against President Nixon. There is no doubt that had the process been carried to its conclusion, made unnecessary by President Nixon's resignation, that Nixon would have been impeached by the House and removed by the Senate. No one seriously accused first Vice President Agnew and later Vice President Ford of any personal involvement or even knowledge of the specific events that brought down Nixon.
What is different here is that the offenses of the Bush administration involve Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and two of the four top cabinet officers currently in office and one former Secretary of Defense. It will not be sufficient to impeach and remove Mr. Bush, but that at a very minimum Mr. Cheney should be impeached and removed as well. It's a tall order, but it must be carried out. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney respect no constitutional limits on executive power. They are a danger to the democratic constitutional institutions and liberties on which the United States was founded. They must be brought down.
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