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Gonzo Resigns
There was some rumor these days that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be replaced by Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff.
Part one is now verified:
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.
Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.
Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the resignation had not yet been made public.
That’s the official story which is of course bogus. AGAG got fired by Bush and Bush certainly would not have done so without having someone else ready to take that job.
Prof. Balkin looks a bit ahead of what might be coming:
The Bush Administration now faces three problems.
The first is finding a person to serve for the last years of a lame duck administration in a department with many unfilled vacancies, a diminished reputation for integrity and serious morale problems.
The second problem is getting the person confirmed before a Democratic controlled Senate. Democrats will very likely grill the nominee in confirmation hearings, and if the nominee was involved in the operations of the current Justice Department, may try to settle scores and demand information about what Gonzales did, leading to yet another standoff over executive privilege.
The third and most serious problem is that Democrats may use the confirmation as a bargaining chip to pry open more disclosures from this most secretive and stubborn of White Houses.
[…]
As said above I don’t think the first problem is really a problem. Bush certainly already has a candidate. The Washington Whispers said:
.. will be replaced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Why Chertoff? Officials say he’s got fans on Capitol Hill, is untouched by the Justice prosecutor scandal, and has more experience than Gonzales did, having served as a federal judge and assistant attorney general.
That’s a sunny view again, likely whispered by some Bush insider, but it solves Bush’s first problem.
The second problem Balkin sees, confirmation, should be easy if Chertoff is the nominee. Up to February 2005 Chertoff was Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. But he left a few days after AGAG was sworn in and is therefore not touched by the prosecutor scandal. Then again Chertoff certainly was to some degree involved in the NSA’s illegal spying dispute and the discussions around that within the Justice Department.
The third problem Balkin sees depends on the spine Democrats might want to show. I don’t expect such to exist, but maybe they can grow one in this case.
There is something else that clearly speaks against Chertoff. Two years ago Katrina threatened and than destroyed New Orleans. It was Chertoff who botched the response to that catastrophe. FEMA chief Brown was scapegoated for that, but the responsibility clearly was Chertoffs.
That alone should disqualify him, though I don’t expect anyone important to make that point.
One question is left where you might have an idea. Why now?
Impeach Them Now!
by Paul Edwards | Aug 24 2007 –
America is in terrible trouble and we all feel it. Diehard “we‚re number one” types deny it, unable to admit failing in what they have been relentlessly schooled from infancy is the best and noblest of countries, but thinking people of all political opinions know it and are openly expressing anger and dismay at the sorry state of our country today.
In their bafflement and ignorance of the political inside game they are wildly divided about what has gone wrong and what should be done to check the disintegration and dissolution they feel and cannot understand. What is clear is that this situation did not come about by cosmic accident. It was caused and causes have origins that are traceable.
The undeniable fact around which all our anxieties and fears are crystallized is the brutal, tragic, unending occupation of Iraq.
Blatant corporate criminality, tax piracy that fattens the richest 0.1% of us while crushing the rest, the haemorrhaging of quality jobs overseas, the relentless attacks on our civil and political rights–all are set aside or subsumed under our deep, abiding, unspoken–mostly unacknowledged–guilt over what we as a country are doing in Iraq. Americans–even many callous and vicious enough to support the rape and destruction of another country so long as it benefits us–know in their hearts that we were wrong, dead wrong from the beginning, in doing what we have done to Iraq.
The painful awareness of this uncontestable tragedy is spreading like wildfire across this country and Americans are disturbed, hurt and grieving because of it. They should be. They have quietly, complacently gone about their routine lives, largely oblivious and astonishingly meek and docile, while this outrage was perpetrated in their name.
A wise, great-souled President, Abe Lincoln said: “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Abe could have been talking about us. You? and me.
And yet in truth we, the people, are not to blame. All of us outside the dark, sinister circle of Bush/Cheney power, were willfully, shamefully deceived. The President of the United States, the Vice President, and their agents, cynically, maliciously lied to us and manipulated America into an unwarranted, unjustified, indefensible attack on a country innocent of either the intent or capacity even to threaten us with harm, let alone inflict it.
So it all comes together. All the angst, guilt, sadness and anger that the American people are feeling because of the savage, unjustifiable invasion and occupation of Iraq is traceable directly to the outrageous lies of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. They, the executive powers of the Republic, are ultimately, damningly to blame.
What then is to be done? What punishment could be so terrible that it would balance the betrayal of an entire nation?
What must the punishment be for men entrusted with the honor and well-being of a great country who have knowingly deceived its people; subverted its constitution; employed its vast powers dishonestly and shamefully; thrown away the lives, limbs and futures of many thousands of its youth; wasted staggering quantities of its wealth; and fouled and disgraced its good name before an appalled and horrified world?
The answer is that no penalty devised by man could be sufficiently condign to punish such an appalling litany of monstrous wrongdoing.
The wise men who wrote and signed our Constitution knew executive power could be abused and dreaded tyranny, having suffered it directly. They had felt the contempt of autocracy, borne the arrogance of unfettered, irresponsible power, and experienced the dreadful jeopardy in which a people stands under a lawless and criminal chief of state. And they proposed a process to address that eventuality: impeachment.
Impeachment, widely misunderstood, is not a punishment but a process. Dictionaries define it as “an accusation of misconduct in office before an appropriate tribunal.” In the case of a President or Vice President, the House of Representatives prepares charges and the Senate sits as jury with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding. Conviction requires a two-thirds majority vote of Senators present.
Article 1, Section 3 reads: “Judgment shall not extend farther than removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any position of honor, trust or profit under the United States; but the party convicted shall nevertheless remain liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment under the law.”
This process was never to be initiated for anything less than the most heinous crimes against the Republic. The grounds for impeachment were bribery, treason, and other “high crimes and misdemeanors”. This latter category was a truly far-sighted and acute provision because it provided a means of calling a President to account for unethical, criminal or unconstitutional actions in violation of his sworn oath to see that the laws are “faithfully executed”. On this solid basis both Bush and Cheney must be impeached.
The case against President Bush has been deeply researched and fully articulated by the best legal minds in America. Stripped of arcane legalisms the four indictments are:
1. He has violated the rights of citizens by ordering the National Security Agency to engage in illegal electronic surveillance of Americans and concealed it from Congress and the public, thereby failing his sworn obligation to see the laws faithfully executed.
2. He has violated his oath of office and his constitutional obligation by initiating the Iraq invasion and occupation on the basis of lies, and deceived the American people and the Congress, thereby subverting the Constitution and undermining our democracy.
3. He has violated the rights of citizens and non-citizens by arbitrary detentions in and outside the U.S. without due process, specific charges, or counsel, and endorsed and condoned torture in defiance of American and international law.
4. He has illegally aggrandized executive power in violation of constitutional principles and separation of powers and violated laws, using “signing statements” to ignore their intent as he sees fit, thereby arrogating legislative powers reserved solely to Congress.
These four charges, taken together, represent by far the greatest betrayal of the American people by a President in the history of the Republic and far outweigh the transgressions of Andrew Johnson, impeached for obstructing the will of Congress; of Bill Clinton, for perjuring himself about a sexual affair; and of Nixon, who resigned rather than face certain conviction for authorizing illegal surveillance and lying about it to Congress.
The gravity of the charges against President Bush–in all of which Cheney is complicit–is such that if those charges should go unexamined and unjudged, it must inevitably corrode the very character of this country and cripple forever its viability as a Republic.
Think! Are we Americans willing to live in a country in which an autocratic chief executive can alter and ignore at will the laws made by our elected Congress?
Are we willing to live in a country in which we can be electronically spied on, our personal lives monitored and documented for no cause, any time, everywhere?
Can we live in a country where anyone can be disappeared and held incommunicado, without right of habeas corpus or accusation, much less trial; where we can be kidnapped and flown anywhere on earth to be imprisoned and tortured, perhaps to death?!
Think! Will we–CAN WE?–continue to face ourselves and our families, our children, our future, in a country so corrupted and degraded that it can be fully aware that its President has tricked it into the horror of an imperialist blitzkrieg and brutal, bloody occupation on the basis of outright lies, and DO NOTHING ABOUT IT?!
I know the arguments of fearful, hostile ignorance and those of cowardly complacency and pusillanimous pragmatism and they are false to the core. The worst of all is the spineless whimper Representatives Pelosi, Conyers, and Senator Reid have made: that impeachment is “off the table”, “a waste of time”, that there are “better things to do”.
I submit to America that unless Bush and Cheney–these two fatally malignant cancers on the body politic–are impeached, America has no reason to have the provision for it in our Constitution. And soon–very soon–we will have no further need for a Constitution at all. Impeach them now!
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/9517
Posted by: Paul Edwards | Aug 28 2007 3:38 utc | 24
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