Molly: the cure for Executive excess

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" Zepp " <zepp

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 18:01:09 -0800

[Zepps_News] Molly: the cure for Executive excess

 

 

 

 

Molly Ivins: The Cure for Executive Excess

 

 

--Can impeachment heal the malady of executive privilege and

wiretapping? It has before.

 

Molly Ivins, Truthdig.com, February 9, 2006

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060209_impeachment_bush/

 

Once upon a time, in the middle of a nasty constitutional crisis in

Washington, a most unlikely hero emerged - a Texas lawyer from one of

our state's notoriously discriminated-against racial minorities. Think

how lucky we were.

 

It is one of the most famous sentences in all of American rhetoric:

" My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. "

But what catches the eye today is the sentence that followed that

famous declaration, the sentence that makes one so ashamed for Al

Gonzales. Barbara Jordan's great, deep voice brought the impeachment

hearings against Richard Nixon to an awed silence when she vowed, " And

I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution,

the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution. "

 

Thirty years ago, this state could produce Barbara Jordan - and now we

send that pathetic pipsqueak Al Gonzales. Enough to provoke a wailing

cry of " O tempera, O mores! " even from the depths of Lubbock.

 

As a New York Times editorial succinctly put it, Attorney General

Gonzales' Judiciary Committee appearance was a " daylong display of

cynical hair-splitting, obfuscation, disinformation and stonewalling. "

 

How fortunate that Republicans running the committee did not insist

the chief law enforcement officer of the United States take an oath

before testifying. God forbid that he should actually be held to the

truth.

 

I realize it's a cliché for those of us who remember the Beach Boys to

mourn the days when giants roamed the Earth and all was on a grander

and finer scale. But I knew Barbara Jordan, and I know Al Gonzales,

and it is damned depressing - he's too lightweight to even be a

mediocrity.

 

It seems to me the trumpery excuse for a hearing raised graver issues

than those of 30 years ago. Gonzales kept trying to frame the issue as

a question of whether or not a domestic spying program without

warrants is illegal - in fact, it is against the law.

 

Gonzales maintained the law is superseded by some unwritten

constitutional power due the president during time of war and further

that Congress had authorized warrantless spying when giving the

president the authority to invade Afghanistan. Strange, so few who

voted for invading Afghanistan recall having warrantless spying in mind.

 

One problem of legal logic is to " define war. " We have not been

attacked by another nation - in fact, we were clearly the aggressors

against Iraq. We were attacked by a private group of ideological

zealots led by a Saudi millionaire. This war - against no nation, flag

or territory - can presumably last indefinitely, like our wars against

drugs and crime.

 

Barbara Jordan observed: " (Impeachment) is designed to 'bridle' the

executive if he engages in excesses.... The Framers confined in the

Congress the power, if need be, to remove the president in order to

strike a delicate balance between a president swollen with power and

grown tyrannical, and preservation of the independence of the executive.

.... 'A president is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the

Constitution.' "

 

Nixon was accused, among other things, of misuse of the CIA. I highly

recommend James Risen's new book, " State of War: The Secret History of

the CIA and the Bush Administration. " Risen is the New York Times

reporter who broke the story of the National Security Agency spying

scandal.

 

Thomas Powers, an authority on American intelligence, reviewed the

Risen book for The New York Review of Books and notes: " If the

Constitution forbids a president anything, it forbids war on his

say-so, and if it insists on anything, it insists that presidents are

not above the law. In plain terms, this means that presidents cannot

enact laws on their own, or ignore laws that have been enacted by

Congress. ...

 

" In public life, as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no. We

are living with the consequences of the inability to say no to the

president's war of choice with Iraq, and we shall soon see how

Congress and the courts will respond to the latest challenge from the

White House - the claim by President Bush that he has the right to

ignore FISA's prohibition of government intrusion on the private

communications of Americans without a court order and his repeated

statements that he intends to go right on doing it. "

 

The time is coming when someone will have to say no. Sadly, I have a

vision of the impeachment panel, and I see Tom DeLay in the seat once

occupied by the great Barbara Jordan.

 

--

" Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government

talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court

order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about

chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order

before we do so "

-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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