Red State Renegade

The Dems sure know how to shoot themselves in the foot.

Sunday poll from MSNBC News website (not a scientific survey):

Am I wrong, but weren’t the last mid-term elections viewed as a ‘vote for change?’

After flip flopping and giving in on every bill relating to defense, and the Iraq troops, the do-nothing congress has also compromised again on a proposal to boost automobile fuel mileage.

At the same time, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid continue to insist that impeachment is ‘off the table,’ despite a petition for Cheney’s impeachment that now lists 127,000 names. As well, An American Research Group poll last month found a majority of Americans — 54 percent — favored Cheney’s impeachment.

Aren’t these people called ‘representatives’ for a reason?

Another upcoming issue is Health Care. We will see if they take a real stand on that or just pay it enough lip service to say that they tried….

Tell the Democratic Movement that you are sick of their spinelessness!

Are you on the email lists of MoveOn, Edward Kennedy, John Edwards or (gasp) John Kerry? Perhaps you receive email (or regular mail) asking you to sign petitions, or ’send a message’ to someone regarding an issue that bothers progressives?

I just received a message from Edward Kennedy (www.democraticmajority.com) regarding Dick Cheney’s snub of Executive Order 12958, requiring accounting of classification of documents by the executive branch, which Cheney openly has ignored since 2003 and now claims his office does not fall under.

The message includes references to his other violations:

“Under Dick Cheney’s watch, some of our country’s most disgraceful moments have happened — from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib. Because of him, the Bush administration started in secrecy, marched to war in secrecy and will end in secrecy, all with great damage to our Constitution, to our government and to the American people.”

It asks me to sign (yet another) petition to:
“Tell Vice President Cheney he’s not above the Constitution. He can’t rewrite the Constitution to suit himself.”

Supposedly they will send a copy of the Constitution to Mr. Cheney along with all our signatures.

Well if Mr. Cheney is in violation of the Constitution, why are we sending him letters? We’ve been doing that for seven years now and he’s just sneering at them and piling them up in his Mosler safes so that he’ll have something to wipe his ass with when hes done wiping with the Constitution!

Cheney was blatantly and openly challenging the law here. And when the federal agency responsible for enforcing the law went after him, he officially suggested abolishing the agency!

I am SICK of hearing that all we can do is write letters or petitions. That’s pathetic (or as Alberto Gonzales said of the Geneva Conventions, that’s “quaint”).

So this time, rather than sign the letter (like a good little Dem), I unsubscribed to Kennedy’s emails, and explained why in a short letter:

I AM the democratic majority. But I am sick of this congress backing down when it comes to matters of the war, matters involving torture, wiretapping. Why would impeachment be off the table when these guys have very likely broken many laws? Let’s stop writing letters and petitions to these crooks and start investigating and indicting them. Have a spine, congress! That’s what we thought we would get when we elected you!

Maybe if we all start rebelling in this way they will actually get scared and do something.

What do you think?

From a live MSNBC poll - keep in mind it is not considered a scientific poll and is perhaps indicative of a liberal audience.

Then again…In many cases, the word ‘liberal’ is equivalent to ‘informed.’

A work in progress - more reasons why Bush should be impeached. Even though I am sticking to a few key points, it’s hard to write this and keep it all timely.

I get anxious wondering if the Bush house of cards will fall on it’s own before I get to finish. Luckily there’s only one more part (I hope)…Then I can send it, thus ensuring another dispatch of the black helicopters:

CONTINUED FROM PART 2, posted May 20:

…Equally questionable is the President’s use of signing statements to openly disregard legislation passed by Congress.

Normally, an administration having serious concerns about a bill can use the presidential veto to express dissatisfaction, a tool allowing congress to re-examine or rewrite the legislation.

But until recently this president has never vetoed a bill, and has instead used such signing statements to effectively exercise a line item veto, a tool deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1988.

The Court declared that the line item veto violates the Constitution’s Presentment Clause, which says that after a bill has passed both Houses, but “before it becomes a Law,” it must be presented to the President, who “shall sign it” if he approves it, but “return it” (veto the bill in its entirety), if he does not.

While other presidents have issued an occassional signing statement, George Bush has issued nearly 800 such statements. Worse, while predecessors used such statements largely as a means of interpreting legal ambiguities or clarifying a law’s purpose or significance, Bush’s statements blatantly assert that he has the right or the intention to disregard or ignore numerous sections of the bills because of powers accorded to him by the Constitution.

Examples of laws quietly nullified in this manner include the much-debated ban on torturing detainees, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, restrictions against using US troops in combat against rebels in Colombia, and numerous requirements to provide information to Congress.

An American Bar Association task force of legal experts (including a former FBI director, a former federal appeals court chief judge, and former Republican officials) resolved that Bush should stop issuing signing statements to bypass the law, and declared that:

“The use, frequency, and nature of the President’s signing statements demonstrates a ‘radically expansive view’ of executive power which ‘amounts to a claim that he is impervious to the laws that Congress enacts’ and represents a serious assault on the constitutional system of checks and balances.”

One panel member (a formal federal prosecutor) declared that these practices, if continued, “threaten to throw this country into a constitutional crisis.”

I so want to just say to Senator Hatch: “Gosh Heck Darnit! I can’t read the news without stumbling accross a new scandal every day. How can you question the idea of impeachment?.”

But alas, opening Orrin’s eyes like that would be a miracle. I’d have a better chance of being raptured up to heaven with Jerry Fallwell, Ted Haggard and 40 virgins…So I will continue my futile attempt at reason where I left off 2 days ago…

CONTINUED FROM PART 1, posted May 17:

Second, there have been blatant violations of the FISA law. The President has admitted on several occassions that he repeatedly authorized wiretaps, without obtaining a warrant, of American citizens engaged in international calls.

In a December 2005 letter to Congress, the Justice Department acknowledged that the President’s October 2001 eavesdropping order did not comply with “the ‘procedures’ of” the law that has regulated domestic espionage since 1978.

The FISA law explicitly requires court approval for such wiretaps and sets up a special procedure for obtaining it. Violation of the law is a felony, with no exceptions:

“A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally— (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute.”

I have written to you at least three times regarding the warrantless wiretapping program. Again, with all due respect, I appreciate your responses but I have heard nothing to dissuade me of the likelihood of illegality, or at least abuse.

All the arguments I have heard from the administration and it’s enablers amount to a claim that George Bush has the right to break the law, a stance directly contradicting Article II of the Constitution, mandating that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . “

All such arguments were considered (and put to rest) by A 2006 report from the Congressional Research Service which concluded that such arguments clashed with existing law and hinged on weak legal grounds.

The authors wrote:

“It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here.” The administration’s legal justification “does not seem to be . . . well-grounded.”

This view was confirmed later in 2006, when a Federal Judge ruled that the program was unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

He declared that the secret NSA program “Violates the Separation of Powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III.”

I write to Senator Orrin Hatch all the time, partly because I feel that people should write to their representatives. But Mr. Hatch is such a loyal Bushie that I’d probably have more chance of being handed gold tablets by an Angel named Moroni than to actually make a difference by writing to him.

But I still write to him, as I enjoy his responses and I like getting mail on fancy government letterheads.

The following is a letter that will be written here in several parts, and, when complete, will be sent to Senator Hatch. It is written in response to his last letter to me, which brushed off the possibility of impeaching George Bush.

With new scandals coming out every day, I felt it my duty to keep Senator Hatch up to date:

Orrin G. Hatch
United States Senator (UT)

Dear Mr. Hatch,
I recently wrote a letter to you in support of the impeachment of President George W. Bush, and wanted to thank you for your prompt response.

Nevertheless, with all due respect, the only part of your letter I can agree with is “In any event, impeachment proceedings must begin in the House of Representatives, not the Senate.”

You also wrote, however, that:

“Policy disagreements, no matter how adamantly they are held, do not amount to the ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ that the Constitution requires to impeach public officials. In addition, low approval ratings are not a constitutional basis for the removal of a sitting president.”

Your implication that such crimes and abuses of power need to be proven before impeachment proceedings begin is completely backwards. Any member of Congress can file for impeachment if he believes the Constitution has been violated, at which point the House Judiciary Committee considers the issues and decides whether to ask the full House to authorize impeachment hearings. It is at these hearings that actual investigations should take place, not before. Calling for proof before these proper investigations is redundant at best, and at worst, a ruse.

Furthermore, my point in writing was not that impeachment was due for low approval ratings, but in fact for the proper reasons set forth in the Constitution. I asked you to rise above routine partisanship and to see the possibility of such transgressions for the good of the American people.

To begin with, there is the Iraq War, an undisputable breach of the UN Charter Articles 2 and 39-50 (”All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means…”) as well as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which provided for “the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy.”

There is abundant evidence the administration manipulated intelligence (as well as the press) to deceive the American people into entering war with Iraq, an action which has affected many U.S. (and Iraqi) families and will have repercussions for generations to come.

If this war was begun in deceit, it is (unlike the trivial sexual encounter of Bill Clinton) indeed a war crime and as such warrants impeachment.

Next: NSA Wiretapping

For four years now I have had a ‘google news alert’ set for the word ‘impeach.’ This feature of google news alerts you on a daily basis of all newspaper mentions of a particular word or phrase.

Four years ago the word ‘impeach’ must have been off-limits to media and even democratic politicians. I would receive my alert each day but it was hardly worth examining - to me it became pretty much another piece of junk mail, and in moments of lowest hope I considered cancelling the alert.

Over time (and especially lately), discussion of impeachment has gone from various leftie ‘rants’ (which the media painted as ‘crazy talk’)…to an occassional mention of the word…to serious discussion.

Now a number of local governments have passed resolutions to consider impeachment.

It’s really mind-blowing to me that this would even be a controversy - after all, proof is not needed for the impeachment process to be initiated, because the process itself is an investigation (And I won’t even discuss the Clinton impeachment).

Why would they fear an investigation if it was truly frivolous, especially if it would absolve their guys and make the lefties look foolish? Because they know that if these guys were seriously investigated, they would go down.

The increasing demand for the possibility of impeachment can be seen in the size and variety of my Google alerts for ‘impeach.’

From friday:

Fairbanks, Alaska:

“You know the Neocons are in trouble when truckers in Texas want “Impeach Bush” buttons.”

From Nyack, New York:

“It’s the executive branch gone wild…It’s not about Bush. It’s about restoring balance to our country. It’s really about future presidents.”

From Salem, Oregon:

“Our so-called president and his sidekicks started this stupid, reckless catastrophe which will never end..Our $200,000-each congressmen need to rise up and impeach this guy and try him for war crimes…This war will never end until Bush is stopped.”

From Brattleboro, Vermont:

“When the story of our time is written by future historians, there will be but one question asked: When confronted with the malevolence and mendacity of the Bush administration, how did the people in positions to do something about it react?”