Drama fills the airwaves. The tragic comedy comes to life, or is theatre of the absurd. The curtain rises. The cast murmurs. They say, it was first heard, or read in May 1897. At the time, Mark Twain and his demise were the topic. Today, The New York Times splashed the story on the front page of the paper. Bill Clinton Tried to Get Meek to Drop Out. The former President and friend of the Meek family, "last week tried to convince Kendrick Meek, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Florida, to drop out of the race."
"The Case for Impeachment: Why Barack Hussein Obama Should be Impeached to Save America" by Steven Baldwin covers all of these issues and more in making its arguments....
"This is the beginning of the end for the United States unless the people exercise their precious remaining liberties and stand and demand that their elected representatives impeach this president before further mortal damage is inflicted upon America," the report concludes....
And the report reveals how rapper Jay-Z and Beyonce were photographed sitting around the "Situation Room" - the confidential White House location filled with top secret communications equipment that allows the tracking of terror threats worldwide.
Access to the room normally requires a high security clearance level.
"Many of Obama's actions, if they do not flat-out violate the Constitution, certainly undermine the spirit and intent of the Constitution as envisioned by our Founding Fathers," the report explains.
Why sure, letting Jay-Z and Beyonce into the Situation Room is an impeachable offense, no question about it!
After all, as more than one top Republican explained during the Clinton impeachment, an impeachable offense is anything that a majority of the House says it is.
Some may think I'm being facetious, but I'm not. Conservative ideologues have never believed that liberals have a legitimate right to rule, no matter what the people say. If people vote for them, then there must be something wrong with the people, and they shouldn't be voting in the first place. That's why suppressing minority votes comes so easily to them. It's why you even hear sporadic calls to repeal women's right to vote. And, of course, it's part of what's behind recent calls to strip birthright citizenship out of the 14th Amendment.
Today, the GOP is deeply in the grip of ideological conservatives, who don't really need any reason to impeach Obama, other than the fact that he's a Democrat. Jay-Z and Beyonce will do just fine as reasons.
Who can tell me who said this and where they said it?
"I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation." -- President Barack Obama, asserting the illegal and unconstitutional power to make war, in a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway.
What about this one -- who and where?
"There may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. . . . As I said, I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. . . . We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified." -- President Barack Obama standing in front of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives, a Constitution that reads "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended."
The Washington Post reports today that President Obama's advisors are planning to recommend that the administration reverse its decision to try the September 11 suspects in federal court and instead opt for military commissions. That's more than just disappointing, given the overwhelming consensus of military and legal experts that civilian courts are more effective for prosecuting terrorists. If the president were to heed that advice, it would also be astonishingly bad politics.
No one disputes that Jay Bybee's name is at the bottom of memos that were, and to some extent still are, treated as laws which legalized aggressive war at the pleasure of a president and a variety of acts of torture. For many months the House Judiciary Committee has had two excuses for not impeaching Judge Bybee, even while proceeding with the impeachments of a judge for groping and another judge for petty corruption. The private excuse has been that impeaching Bybee would be opposed by Fox News. The public excuse has been that the Justice Department has not yet released its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on the crimes of Bybee and his former colleagues.
If a group of dedicated scholars, attorneys, journalists, and activists had tried to generate a comprehensive list of impeachable offenses committed by George W. Bush as president, and only 35 of them had been introduced into Congress, one of the many discarded ones, in rough and overly detailed form, might have read something like this:
In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed", has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, caused the United States of America to kidnap, imprison, intimidate, coerce, threaten, confine, abduct, and carry away the elected, constitutional President of Haiti, and his wife, a U.S citizen, in violation of United States statutes, to wit:
It's October 23, 2002, and you're Jay Bybee, the man in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice. John Yoo and a bunch of other lawyers willing to claim that absolutely anything is legal work for you. But you'd much rather be a judge. That would be a cushy job, a lifetime job, a job with a book of the Bible named for it, a job where you would get to decide which crimes to legalize rather than being told by someone else, a job where you might eventually even get to rule on the legality of some of the crimes you were presently engaged in committing. At the moment, however, if you want to become a judge you're going to have to follow instructions, and that means legalizing the greatest crime of them all. Millions may die in the process, but you will get that nomination and you will become a judge.
There is strong evidence that John Conyers, Patrick Leahy, and most of the rest of us are in love with torture-lawyer Jay Bybee. I'm not talking about sexual love and wouldn't, because people's lives are lost to such bread-and-circuses journalism every day. I'm talking deep personal devotion.
Let's examine the evidence.
1. As head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee committed felonies in exchange for being nominated to a life-time seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bybee violated the Anti-Torture Statute and the War Crimes Statute by facilitating torture through secret memos purporting to legalize specific criminal acts. Bybee also played a leading role in a conspiracy to violate the UN Charter, the US Constitution, and the War Powers Act by signing a secret memo purporting to give presidents the unrestricted power to launch aggressive wars.
Jay Bybee wrote another memo that nobody has noticed, one purporting to authorize crimes far worse than torture, the same crimes the torture was itself intended to create false justifications for. On October 23, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Bybee signed a 48-page memo to the "counsel to the president" (Alberto Gonzales) titled "Authority of the President Under Domestic and International Law to Use Military Force Against Iraq." This was another secret law, but instead of authorizing particular uses of torture (which in reality were far exceeded, engaged in prior to the memos, etc.), this one authorized any president to single-handedly commit what Nuremberg called "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." And while the torture memos extensively and grotesquely limited the days of sleep deprivation and the hours of waterboarding, the aggressive war memo included only a single paragraph at the bottom of page 47 requiring that:
In part 1, I outlined four categories of problems with Bybee's reasoning. In this piece, I'd like to tackle his (and CIA's) reliance on the use of these tactics in other contexts, most frequently as part of military counter-interrogation training.
In the first portion of the memo, pages 1-6, Bybee outlines some evidence CIA has provided him on the use of these techniques, in terms of the potential harm they cause. The premise of this is sound, but it falls down in Bybee and CIA's reliance on it, because in fact the evidence they're able to gather is far too scattered and in most cases, not nearly applicable enough for any surety as to the safety and harmlessness of these tactics.
Bybee primarily relies on the experience of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, where (voluntary members of the military) are put through a POW-camp escape training exercise, involving recapture and subsequent interrogation by a hostile government power. Inside an analysis of Bybee's use of this.
Digby and DDay have been covering the growing calls for the impeachment of 9th Circuit Court Judge Jay Bybee, the author of this OLC memorandum endorsing the legality of the CIA's proposed interrogation tactics on Abu Zubaydah.
I'd like to make my own run at this horrendous document. Many particular passages have been repeatedly quoted, but I don't want to lose the burning forest for the fetid, rotting trees on this one. The thesis of the document is deeply flawed, resting on numerous obviously ridiculous unstated assumptions.
She said it! I never thought this day would come. Change has truly arrived in America, even before the Presidential Inauguration. Today, on Fox News, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, the only person who could, the woman who for so long would not, stated, she is Open to the Prosecution of Bush Administration Officials. Oh joy! Oh, bliss. Never did I imagine this moment might become a reality. Even the idea that this could be a possibility eluded me. Today, on January 18, 2009, finally, I have hope. I believe in the future, as Michelle Obama expressed, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, or I will be when I see an actionable censure.
So long as the Bush Administration remains in place, there's no presumption of good faith, making any bailout plan politically unpalatable.
The first order of business thus becomes impeachment and removal, with a saner Republican taking the reins as a caretaker until Obama takes office in January.
Constitutionally, the steps would be...
1. Pelosi resigns as Speaker.
2. Consensus caretaker elected Speaker, with Democratic support.
3. Removal of Bush, Cheney
4. Pelosi resumes Speakership.
I'd nominate veteran Wisconsin Rep. Tom Petri, who voted against the latest bailout plan, but is open to a more carefully negotiated replacement. For the last 15 years he's been one of the least partisan House Republicans, which cost him the Chairmanship of the Transportation Committee in the years of Republican control of that body.
There's too much going on today. I spoke to a Democratic chief of staff who told me that everything on the Hill is exceptionally confused. She said that leadership - Reid, Pelosi, Barney Frank, Rahm, Schumer, Dodd, Clyburn - were brought into a room with Paulson and Bernanke and told that if they did not act, jobs would be lost, people wouldn't get their paychecks, student loans wouldn't go through, credit card limits would be crammed down, etc. She said they were scared, and lots of Democrats are angry that they got scared by the GOP Daddy's in nice suits.
The same people painting a dire picture are the ones who pushed through the AUMF, at the same time, banks are failing. There's a progressive caucus meeting right now going on, and two things are sure. One, the initial proposal is a nonstarter unless it is passed with Republican votes. And two, it is a very confused situation. One minute Hoyer says one thing, the next minute Barney says something different, that kind of thing. She says offices are being flooded with calls, so members know how unpopular this package is. The Club for Growth has come out against it, but most of the calls (at least to her office) against the bailout are coming from the left. Naked capitalism has a similar picture of the internal deliberations.
So that's what I have right now.
In the latest ARG poll, Bush has a 19% approval rating, a 76% disapproval rating, and 5% undecided. I'm actually kind of impressed with the 19% dead-enders. That's commitment. On the other hand, if he were impeached, I'm not sure anyone would notice.
We made Gawker! To be specific, anonymous angry lawmaker made Gawker. That set of emails is by the way the most popular posts ever on OpenLeft. We also made Calculated Risk and a producer from This American Life asked me to contact the member. People are MAD.
I'll be going to this event tomorrow morning with Steny Hoyer, and then to a New America forum on the financial meltdown. Dontcha just love DC. Any questions I should ask?
Can this be done? Can the Paulson juggernaut be stopped? I'm starting to think yes. Paulson displayed a lot of arrogance here - he basically marched in and said Daddy knows best, don't worry your pretty little heads about the details. He offered no, zero, zilch explanation of how the plan was supposed to work - just "it's a crisis and we need to act now." And he overreached, especially with that demand for immunity from any review.
Now we've had a lot of pushback from economists and financial analysts, and the realization has sunk in that this particular daddy has shown very little sign of knowing best.
I enjoyed this video of McCain advisors whining way too much.
As you might have heard by now, Kucinich has introduced articles of impeachment into the congressional record, and has submitted a motion that will require the House to take action on the matter either today or tomorrow.
My basic feeling on impeaching Bush and Cheney is that if we had a Congress that was capable of impeaching and convicting those two, then we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. A Congress that was willing to impeach and convict Bush and Cheney over Iraq would have already stopped the Iraq war. A Congress that was willing to impeach and convict Bush and Cheney over FISA would not have passed a bad FISA bill last August. A Congress that was willing to impeach Bush and Cheney would never have allowed Bush and Cheney to take office, and would have overturned the 2000 election results. A Congress that was willing to impeach Bush and Cheney over signing statements would have, well, impeached Bush and Cheney a long, long time ago. A Congress that was willing to impeach bush and Cheney would have at least conducted more thorough and effective investigations of administration wrongdoing since the start of 2007.
In short, if we had a Congress that was willing to impeach and convict Bush and Cheney, then we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. A Congress that was willing to impeach and convict Bush and Cheney would already have stopped all of their more egregious breaches of the Constitution, and damage they have caused to both the nation and the world. After failing to stop the war, after failing to stop warrantless wiretapping, after failing to stop the 2000 election from being stolen, after failing to stop most of Bush's desired legislation from passing, and after failing to conduct damaging, public investigations, moving directly for impeachment feels like trying out for the NBA the week after failing to make your high school's junior varsity basketball team. The entire reason that Bush and Cheney should be impeached is because the Congress didn't stop them from performing their egregious activities in the first place. If we failed to stop them before, why should anyone expect that we will remove them from office now?
Still, Kucinich's articles of impeachment deserve a vote on the House floor, rather than simply being tabled and referred to the judiciary committee. Back during the Iraq supplemental fight last spring, all sides were at least allowed to vote on their desired legislation, even if, in the end, it was a blank check that passed against the wishes of the majority of the Democratic caucus. If the progressive left is a valued member of the Democratic coalition, it should at least be allowed to register its support for impeachment on the floor of the House. The most recent poll on impeachment showed 36% of the country in favor, which probably means that a majority of the Democratic coalition is in favor. If we are passing blank checks on Iraq and bad FISA bills against the wishes of the majority of the Democratic caucus, we should at least be allowed to vote on bills like impeachment that are supported by a majority of Democrats.
It won't pass, and it won't change anything, but it will at least allow a large segment of the progressive coalition to have its voice heard on the House floor. Bring Kucinich's articles of impeachment to a full vote, and give all members of our coalition their day in the sun.
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