Gerald Pechenuk

In his latest column, former U.S. Treasury official Paul Craig Roberts says that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have established the precedent that impeachment is a “dead letter law,” with both Congress and the Judiciary accepting their impotence in the face of a tyrannical executive. As an illustration of how this state of affairs came about, Roberts cites a communication he received from Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School.

Boyle relates how, on the eve of the Iraq War in March 2003, Rep. John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, convened an emergency meeting of 40 or more of his top advisors, mostly lawyers. Boyle continues:

“The purpose of the meeting was to discuss and debate immediately putting into the U.S. House of Representatives Bills of Impeachment against President Bush Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft, in order to head off the impending war. Congressman Conyers kindly requested that Ramsey Clark and I come to the meeting in order to argue the case for impeachment.



“This impeachment debate lasted for two hours. It was presided over by Congressman Conyers, who quite correctly did not tip his hand one way or the other on the merits of impeachment. He simply moderated the debate between Clark and I, on the one side, favoring immediately filing Bills of Impeachment against Bush Jr. et al. to stop the threatened war, and almost everyone else there, who were against impeachment for partisan political reasons.”



Summarizing the two-hour debate, Boyle states:

“Suffice it to say that most of the experts there opposed impeachment not on the basis of enforcing the Constitution and the Rule of Law, whether international or domestic, but on the political grounds that it might hurt the Democratic Party’s effort to get their presidential candidate elected in the year 2004. As a political independent, I did not argue that point. Rather, I argued the merits of impeaching Bush Jr., Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft under the United States Constitution, U.S. federal laws, U.S. treaties and other international agreements to which the United States is a party….



“After two hours of most vigorous debate among those in attendance, the meeting adjourned with second revised draft Bills of Impeachment sitting on the table.”



Boyle said to former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, on the way out of the building after the hour debate: “‘Ramsey, I don’t understand it. Why didn’t those people take me up on my offer to stick around, polish up my draft bills of impeachment, and put them [the bills] in there right away in order to head off this war?’



“And Ramsey replied: ‘I think most of the people there want a war.’”



Boyle relates how John Podesta, speaking on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (now a top advisor to Obama), told Conyers that the Democratic Party did not want Conyers to pursue the impeachment effort, because it might jeopardize whoever the Democratic presidential candidate was going to be in 2004. Instead, the Democratic Party wanted to give Bush and Cheney their war on Iraq, so that the Democrats would fare better in the 2004 national elections.



As Roberts characterizes it: “Think about that, not just the stupidity of the Democratic Party — whenever has a party at war been in danger of electoral defeat? Look and see! Here is the spokesman for the Democratic Party telling Conyers: ‘Don’t prevent a war, because we will benefit politically from it. Let the Iraqi people die. Let our soldiers die. We Democrats will benefit from it.’”