Good Night, and Good Luck.

by Kagro X

Ladies and Gentlemen, the time has come to impeach this administration or die with your hands in your pockets.

I can't put it any more plainly than that.

Or this headline, from the New York Times:

Privileged Conversations Said Not Excluded From Spying

Or for that matter, this one from the Boston Globe:

Bush shuns Patriot Act requirement

If you were waiting for some final straw, may I humbly suggest that the elimination of attorney-client privilege, compounded by yet another signing statement -- this time accompanying the PATRIOT Act renewal -- which makes it as plain as day that this "administration" has no intention of even recognizing the power of the Legislative Branch to make "law," much less obeying it should "the Congress" insist on persisting in their silly game of make believe?

Let the AP give you the flavor:

The National Security Agency could have legally monitored ordinarily confidential communications between doctors and patients or attorneys and their clients, the Justice Department said Friday of its controversial warrantless surveillance program.

Responding to questions from Congress, the department also said that it sees no prohibition to using information collected under the NSA's program in court.

"Because collecting foreign intelligence information without a warrant does not violate the Fourth Amendment and because the Terrorist Surveillance Program is lawful, there appears to be no legal barrier against introducing this evidence in a criminal prosecution," the department said in responses to questions from lawmakers released Friday evening.

There it is. Collecting foreign intelligence information, if that's what it is, without a warrant does not violate the Fourth Amendment. Done. The Terrorist Surveillance Program is lawful. Done.

Questions? Your questions are important to us. Please stay on the line. Put on this orange jumpsuit and one of our operators will be with you shortly.

On the PATRIOT Act front, dig this:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.

Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

If you're not buying what I'm selling, peep this, from Glenn Greenwald, on the DoJ's answers to "Congress":

Question number (5) from the Committee Republicans asked "whether President Carter's signature on FISA in 1978, together with his signing statement," meant that the Executive had agreed to be bound by the restrictions placed by FISA on the President's powers to eavesdrop on Americans. This is how the DoJ responded, in relevant part:

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statutes inconsistent with the Constitution must yield. The basic principle of our system of government means that no President, merely by assenting to a piece of legislation, can diminish the scope of the President's constitutional power. . . .

Just as one President may not, through signing legislation, eliminate the Executive Branch's inherent constitutional powers, Congress may not renounce inherent presidential authority. The Constitution grants the President the inherent power to protect the nation from foreign attack, and Congress may not impede the President's ability to perform his constitutional duty.“ (citations omitted).

Can that be any clearer for you - Congressmen, Senators, journalists? The President is bestowed by the Constitution with the unlimited and un-limitable power to do anything that he believes is necessary to "protect the nation." Thus, even if Congress passes laws which seek to limit that power in any way, and even if the President agrees to those restrictions and signs that bill into law, he still retains the power to violate it whenever he wants.

Thus, Sen. DeWine can pass his cute little bill purporting to require oversight, or Sen. Specter can pass his, or they can do nothing and leave FISA in place. None of that matters, because no matter what Congress or even the President do with regard to the law, the law does not restrict what the President can do in any way. They are telling the Congress to its face that all of the grand debates it is having and the negotiations it is conducting are all irrelevant farces, because no matter what happens, the President retains unlimited power and nothing that Congress does can affect that power in any way.

Meanwhile, Barney Frank, a Member of "Congress" whose intellect and rhetorical ability I respect enormously, maintains that, "Impeachment is an outlet for anger and frustration, which I share, but politics ain't therapy. Bush would much rather debate impeachment than the disastrous war in Iraq." And he's far from alone. This is, I think, by far the majority view among "Congressional" Democrats. And to be fair, I doubt that Barney's comments are informed by these latest revelations. But I'm equally doubtful that they'll change his mind.

And therein lies the tragedy: "Congressional" Democrats simply don't seem to have absorbed the lesson that Bush and his "administration" are sociopathic. Yes, I'm sure they would rather debate impeachment than the disastrous war in Iraq. And I'm sure they'd rather do so for all the reasons Congressman Frank thinks so.

We both believe that Bush thinks he can rally his base by frightening them with the prospect of impeachment should Democrats take control of "the Congress" next year. The difference we have is this: "Congressional" Democrats believe his interest is merely in rallying his base for the elections, whereas I believe that if he succeeds in locking Democrats into a policy of impeachment avoidance, he intends to perpetrate even more outrageous assaults on our traditional understandings of the separation of powers and the constitutional order.

I'm not a big fan of the "Karl Rove is behind every tree" school of political strategery, but if we're supposed to buy into the notion that Republican strategists legitimately want the debate to be about impeachment, we're going to have to do a little bit of thinking about what it means to give these sociopaths that kind of latitude. Frank, Pelosi, and even Reid, to a certain extent, are asking us to lock ourselves in a box and toss away the key. I would find it much easier to understand and even agree with their strategy if I had any indication from them that they understood that they were dealing with a bunch of maniacs who only happen to occupy the offices we traditionally respect and give latitude to because we've never had the poor fortune to see them occupied by maniacs before.

We've finally reached the point where the competing goal of "winning back Congress" should quite obviously mean less than the necessity of pursuing impeachment. Now, those of you waiting for an egraved invitation have finally gotten your wish.

Comments

[John Casper]

"Impeachment Whisper's Growing"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032402248.html
Nothing particularly new in the WaPooh's article, but it is relevant that they used the "I" word. I suspect this will get their polling hack, I mean expert, Richard Morin to poll impeachment. This also moves Feingold's Censure resolution to something that "moderates" will gravitate to.

[emptypockets]

Doctor-patient, lawyer-client; what about priest-parishioner? Time for some pious Democrat (not you, Joe) to begin taking back the cloak of religious faith from the right. It's the Republican DoJ out there hiding mics in confessional booths, and it will fall to card-carrying members of civil liberties groups to defend your religious freedoms.

[janinsanfran]

Lots of thoughts -- as I commented at Greenwald's blog, what we are dealing with here confirms Newtonian physics: "an object at rests tends to remain at rest..." That's the Dems in a nut shell. The more hopeful corollary is that if we can ever get them rolling, they might keep moving. But a heck of a lot of initial force, from outside their closed little world, is going to be required to get them moving. And we'll have to be be the ones to apply it -- the President's actions aren't what moves them.

How to get Dems rolling: guess since we can't get them moving in DC, we have to make it very difficult for them to come home and rest (noisy outside those mansions.) Unfortunately that is going to take a quality of political organization not currently extant. Is Move-On on with impeachment? If not, why not?

Re Barney: sure, hell of a smart political guy, but one who too often goes along to get along. I've thought so ever since he stuck up for Bill Clinton over "don't ask, don't tell." When you are willing to pacify your own, you've fallen over an integrity cliff as far as I am concerned.

My third paragraph illustrates the problem of having a political memory. :-)

[janinsanfran]

Answered my own question -- Move-On seems to be doing censure. Good start. Important to go do that, plus everything else we can think of.

[John Casper]

I completely agree emptypockets. Xtianity has a long tradition of social justice, dating back to the scriptures. Roman Catholic priests were at the forefront of "Liberation Theology" in Central and South American. The Reformed tradition, in Xtianity led by Dr. King, led the non-violent Civil Rights War of the 20th Century and played a very significant role in ending the Vietnam War. (IMO, Roman Catholicism is crippled by male supremacy and mandatory celibacy in its hierarchy. Over the centuries the quality of leadership has degraded into church mice. They are preoccupied with hiding the latest assault on an altar boy. I am afraid RC's won't be much help in this latest fight, at least wrt to leadership from their priestly class.)

[TCinLA]

Quote:

...in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch...

"The unitary executive branch" is the key to all of this - this is the philosophy that basically states the Divine Right of Bush, and is held by nearly all the advisors to both Bush and Cheney. This pernicious doctrine, which has no basis in constitutional scholarship other than some word-parsing by far right traitors, is the real war that is going on in this country, the war the Congress -Republicans and Democrats alike - don't see or understand, that the public has no knowledge of. This is the coup d'etat planned by the Right through the presidency of Bush.

If we don't start fighting it now, and get the artillery to start pounding them with in November, there won't be a constitutional republic by 2008, elections or no elections.

I know I'm sounding extreme here, but this is the point where the Old Roman Republic confronted the Caesars.

[texas dem]

This is when I wish we had a Democratic Noise Machine. And not just a popular media driven one either.

In a well organized Democratic environment, we wouldn't rely on elected Democrats to carry the weight here. We'd have a mirror of Cato that would publish a big ass case. We'd have emissaries making that case to editors and producers long before any elected Democrat breathed a word of it, so that when a Durbin finally did say something, the editors would know exactly what he's talking about and how to understand it, and wouldn't run with a "Democrats are high on moonbeams" story. Simultaneously, we'd have an innernet equivalent of Rush Limbaugh pumping up the base, so that Durbin would be met with press-noteworthy enthusiasm from that corner when he finally said something. And we'd have a Fox News prepping the apolitical middle, so that voters weren't shocked when elected Dems went live.

Asking people who have to win 51% to lead you seems like asking for cowardice and heartbreak. Granted, we do have 20 secure senators, but then they're looking at trying to win 51% as a caucus -- in other words, at Ohio and Montana and Missouri. I'm not actually old enough to have observed this stuff longitudinally, so maybe even with these constraints, elected Dems used to practice leadership. But without ever having seen that myself, it seems that asking people who have to be greatly concerned with positioning -- where are they relative to 51% -- to also lead is dumping too many roles on them. Their proper job is to finesse, look purty, get elected, and then implement our crap. But if their job is to implement extreme government and then smile as if they're a lovable common-sense moderate, they need to know ahead of time that whatever partisan move we want them to make won't explode in their face. They need to know the ground is prepared, the editors are clued in, and the press will be such that no large voting population will move the wrong way. And setting the stage seems to be the job of a Democratic establishment, or, since we dont seem to have one, maybe a souped-up version of us.

This is a slightly negative meta-analysis, and for that reason I wonder if it's appropriate to be dropping into this thread. If it's an unhelpful distraction, please feel free to delete it, because I support what you're doing. I'm also aware that you have been leading on this issue in exactly the way I'm talking about. If I had anything negative-constructive to say about that, it would be that your visible efforts seem to be focused on getting elected officials to do things, which would have to be one part of a strategy for the elected-officials-are-appropriately-cowards reasons above. (Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Clemons focuses on getting former appointed officials to do things, and Marshall focuses on educating journalists.)

At any rate, I'm certainly convinced (by you) that we're in some flavor of Constitutional Crisis. I'm not all that surprised that elected officials are afraid to lead on that subject, even when the Senators are probably fully aware and are seeing their own prerogatives destroyed. (Actually, on second read, it looks like you think they aren't fully aware, which is much more interesting.) It seems like there's lots of things that need to be done to help them, including making sure that whenever any elected official says something, the press coverage is informed and positive. I've now run out of useful things to say -- if in fact I ever had any -- so I'm going to quit telling you how to do your project, and get back to work on mine. But it sure is fun to drop by, I hope I'm not being rude, and as always, your stuff is interesting and informative. Thanks.

[freepatriot]

so the presnit could superseed the 2nd amendment and sieze all the firearms in the country

has anybody told the freepi about this ???

[Kagro X]

God, that's a good observation, e-pockets.

"God!" Get it?

MoveOn.org? They've got to be about censure, no? Weren't they founded on the premise of "Censure and move on?"

How to get Dems moving in DC? From their home states, of course. Pass impeachment resolutions locally, and they'll come along. The last several cosponsors of Conyers' resolution did.

[Brian Boru]

"I know I'm sounding extreme here, but this is the point where the Old Roman Republic confronted the Caesars."

If I remember my history, Caesar won.

[Petey]

"If I remember my history, Caesar won."

Shhhh... Please don't interrupt the folks who want to feel good about themselves by venting.

Everyone knows that civil liberties is a winning campaign issue.

If only those 44 cowardly Democrats in the Senate were to stand strongly in a symbolic defeat for civil liberties, the republic would be saved, and the left would win huge victories in November. Everyone knows that.

[macdust]

I have now lost my posting privileges at DailyKos for the sin of confronting DHinMI's bullying.

[Jane]

Hello ! This is very [url=http://www.google.com/bb497]good[/url] site !!

[JohnLopresti]

For the troll visitors, KX said Caesars in the plural. There was more history than the conquest of Gaul, though in modern times it remains curiously arguable whether life in the land managed by the Franks is a better existence than one passed in the Apennine lands. Check the June 25, 2006 thread for the modernization of our comments.