Red State Renegade

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

From Rachel Maddow at Air America…

This is very relevant to me because as a Utah resident, I write to Orrin Hatch about once a month:

Dear Senator Hatch -

You don’t call, you don’t write…

I’ve just about exhausted myself trying to get someone in your office to call me back this week. Please apologize to your adorable receptionist on my behalf - the poor man now gets audibly exasperated as soon as I say “hello”.

What I’d like to talk with you about is very simple: on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday, you said this about Carol Lam, the US Attorney for San Diego who was fired by the Justice Department in December:

“She was a former law professor, no prosecutorial experience, and the former campaign manager in Southern California for Clinton”

I checked the transcript against the video (or click here for the specific clip) and it’s clear to me that you weren’t misquoted.

Here’s my question for you or your staff: what in the Lord’s name are you talking about?

Here at Air America, we called John Emerson, who managed Clinton’s California campaign in ‘92 and again in ‘96 to ask if Carol Lam had been the “campaign manager in Southern California for Clinton” - you might have thought we’d asked him if the sky was green.

First of all, uh, NO, she wasn’t.

And second, Carol Lam was an Assistant US Attorney at the time of Clinton’s campaigns, and she therefore couldn’t have also been a campaign manager for any presidential candidate without violating the (ironically-named) Hatch Act, which restricts political activity by federal government employees.

Then we called a source close to Carol Lam in California, who expressed utter bewilderment at what old Orrin said on Meet the Press.

The source confirmed for us publicly-available documents about Lam’s career which indicate that she is not a law professor, she’s “been a federal prosecutor for nearly 18 years and [has] never been a fundraiser for any president”.

Senator Hatch, what’s going on here?

Can you guess?

What does Congressman Rob Bishop have in common with this crowd?:

They both have large frickin’ BALLS!

I wrote to Congressman Bishop (R-Utah) weeks back to express my concern about the ‘troop surge,’ an idea about as handy as a downhill stairmaster (but probably more harmful).

He replied back with a well written two page letter defending the idea of a troop surge, and re-gurgitating GW Bush’s talking points like a reversible garbage disposal.

Not a big surprise from the guy that (along with Orrin Hatch) was surely a volume buyer of Bush Action figures.

But he actually had the BALLS to imply that the surge idea was recommended by the Iraq Study Group!.

Is Bishop trying to “out-hatch” Senator Orrin Hatch?

Somehow I recalled the surge idea being quite a turnaround from the recommendations of James Baker’s group.

According to their report:

“Sustained increases in US troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq, which is the absence of national reconciliation. A senior American general told us that adding US troops might temporarily help limit violence in a highly localized area. However, past experience indicates that the violence would simply rekindle as soon as US forces are moved to another area. As another American general told us, if the iraqi government does not make progress, ‘all the troops in the world will not provide security.’ Meanwhile, America’s military capacity is stretched thin; We do not have the troops or equipment to make a substantial, sustained increase in our troop presence.”

Already our military is feeling the weight of the surge. This week’s Time magazine offers a sad cover story, “America’s Broken-Down Army,” which describes the effect of yet another failed Bush policy on the young men and women of our military:

“Bush warned that if Democrats in Congress did not pass a bill to fund the war on his terms, ‘the price of that failure will be paid by our troops and their loved ones.’ But they are already paying a price for decisions he has made, and the larger costs are likely to be borne for at least a generation.”