President Bush Will Not Be Impeached (11/24/06)
by Dean T. Hartwell
President Bush will escape impeachment. Never mind that he deserves it for his lies to Congress about the Iraq War and his use of warrantless wiretaps.
The Constitution states that "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
But the Constitution never stood in the way of impeachment. Instead, another set of rules really governs. The Rules of Impeachment are clear: Don't bother bringing charges if your party will be implicated or if the charges concern foreign policy.
Republicans could bring up impeachment against President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair. It did not matter that Clinton committed no crime. What mattered is that no Republicans were involved in the domestic scandal.
So why can't the Democrats follow the rules and target Bush? It is because the Democrats have been complicit in Bush's crimes mentioned above.
Before the Iraq War, leading Democrats like Richard Gephardt met with President Bush to express their support for ousting Saddam Hussein from Iraq. Even presidential nominee John Kerry later admitted that he would have voted for the Iraq War even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, the source of one of Bush's lies. Approximately half of all Congressional Democrats voted for the resolution authorizing President to use force in Iraq, if necessary.
As far as the warrantless wiretapping is concerned, leading Democrats knew about it, too. There is no record of any Congressional Democrats, for instance, those on Intelligence Committees which received information on it, asking for the wiretap program's discontinuance.
This complicity demonstrates the immunity typically given to presidents who get assistance from the other party. But it should also be pointed out that Bush framed the issues as foreign policy-based since they dealt with war and the threat of terrorism.
Then there was President Nixon. He ordered the illegal bombing of neutral nation Cambodia in 1969 and its invasion one year later. No serious attempt to impeach him was made. Then he covered up the break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. In a taped conversation with H.R. Haldeman, he told his advisor to disrupt an FBI investigation about Watergate. With no one to blame but himself, Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment.
On the other hand, Democrats chose not to start impeachment proceedings against President Reagan despite the Iran-Contra scandal. There, the Reagan Administration had shipped weapons to Iran in violation of U.S. law in the hopes that it would persuade pro-Iranian forces to release hostages held in Lebanon. And the Reagan Administration again broke our laws when money was taken from those sales and given to the Contras in Nicaragua. Congress had previously passed the Boland Amendment forbidding any government aid to them.
Despite overwhelming evidence of two impeachable offenses, the Democratic-controlled Congress told President Reagan that if he hired Howard Baker as his new Chief of Staff (they trusted his ability to clean house at the White House because of his sense of fair play at the Watergate Hearings), they would drop impeachment charges. In this foreign policy scandal, the opposing party caved in just as they had done about Cambodia almost two decades earlier.
In the end, it is highly unlikely that any President will ever be removed from office by the impeachment process. Both parties want a free hand in controlling foreign policy when they have control of the White House. And both parties know that to impeach, one must "come to the plate with clean hands." It is hard to find any such person or party in politics these days.