By Dave Lindorff

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power

held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged

farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a

grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both

testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and

of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the

enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s democracy

by two aspiring tyrants in the White House.

As Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the committee, made clear

more than once during the six-hour session, this was “not an

impeachment hearing, however much many in the audience might wish it to

be” He might well have added that he himself was not the fierce

defender of the Constitution and of the authority of Congress that he

once was before gaining control of the Judiciary Committee, however

much his constituents, his wife, and Americans across the country might

wish him to be.

At the same time, while the hearing was strictly limited to the

most superficial airing of Bush administration crimes and misdemeanors,

the fact that the session—technically an argument in defense of 26

articles of impeachment filed in the House over the past several months

by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)--was nonetheless a major victory for the

impeachment movement. It happened because earlier in the month, House

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has sworn since taking control of the

House in November 2006, that impeachment would be “off the table”

during the 110th Congress, called a hasty meeting with Majority Leader

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Conyers, and Rep. Kucinich, and called

for such a limited hearing.

It was no coincidence that shortly before Pelosi’s backdown, peace

activist and Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan announced that her campaign

had collected well over the 10,000 signatures necessary to qualify for

listing on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress against

Pelosi in the Speaker’s home district in San Francisco. Sheehan has

been an outspoken advocate of impeaching both Bush and Cheney. “Pelosi

is trying to throw a bone to her constituents by allowing a hearing on

impeachment,” said Sheehan, who came to Washington, DC to attend. “It’s

just like her finally stating publicly that Bush’s presidency is a

failure—something it has taken her two years to come to, but which

we’ve been saying for years.”

So determined were Pelosi and Conyers to limit the scope and

intensity of the hearing that they acceded to a call for Republicans on

the Judiciary Committee to adhere to Thomas Jefferson’s Rules of the

House, which prohibit any derogatory comments about the President,

which was interpreted by Chairman Conyers as meaning no one, including

witnesses or members of the committee, could suggest that Bush had lied

or deceived anyone. Since a number of Rep. Kucinich’s proposed articles

of impeachment specifically charge the president with lying to Congress

and the American People, this made for some comic moments, with witness

Bruce Fein, a former assistant attorney general under former President

Ronald Reagan, to say he would reference his listing of crimes to the

“resident” of the White House.

In the end, the rule imposing a gag on calling the president a

criminal fell by the wayside, with witness Vincent Bugliosi. A former

Los Angeles deputy district attorney, accusing Bush of being guilty of

the murder of over 4000 American soldiers and of hundreds of thousands

of innocent Iraqi civilians because he had “lied” the country into an

illegal and unnecessary war, and with committee member Shiela Jackson

Lee (D-TX) suggesting that the president may have committed treason in

invading Iraq, and that he appeared to be preparing to do it again with

an unprovoked invasion of Iran.

Conyers also acquiesced in a Republican effort to minimize public

monitoring and involvement in the hearing, allowing the minority party

to fill most of the available seats in the hearing room with office

staffers who showed little interest in the proceedings. Only a few

dozen of the hundreds of pro-impeachment activists who had come to the

Rayburn Office Building at 7 am in order to get seats in the Judiciary

Committee hearing room were allowed in, with the rest having to remain

in the hall or go to two remote “overflow” rooms to watch the

proceedings on a TV hookup. Conyers also went along with a call by

Republican members of the committee to have some of those who did make

it into the hearing ejected simply for wearing buttons on their shirts

calling for impeachment (the Republican members referred to these as

“signs”), though such small personal tokens are routinely allowed in

congressional hearing rooms.

It was clear that this was to be a tightly controlled and strictly limited hearing.

It was also clear that it was intended to go nowhere.

At one point, after hearing witnesses like Fein, Bugliosi, former

representative and Nixon impeachment committee member Elizabeth

Holtzman, former Salt Lake City mayor and impeachment activist Rocky

Anderson, former House Clinton impeachment manager Bob Barr, former

Watergate Committee counsel and current senior counsel of the Brennan

Center for Justice Frederick A.O. Schwartz, and Elliott Adams,

president of the board of Veterans for Peace, lay out the

administration’s crimes and abuses of power—which included charges of

usurping the legislative powers of Congress, violating international

treaties, war crimes, lying to Congress, an illegal war, felony

violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth

Amendment, defying Congressional subpoenas, obstruction of justice and

more, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the Constitution

subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, appeared convinced that the

abuses were real and serious.

But Nadler, who for two years has been a major obstacle on the

Judiciary Committee to any efforts to move impeachment to a formal

hearing, said, “No president has been removed from office through

impeachment.” He asked the witnesses, “How would you approach

impeachment today so it would be a viable option?”

Former Rep. Holtzman responded, “The real remedy to a president who

believes he is above the law is impeachment. There is no running away

from that.” She said, “An impeachment inquiry, handled fairly, could

work. Maybe I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I believe it could work.”

The basic point, made by Holtzman, by Fein and by many others,

including this writer, is that worrying about the political opposition

to impeachment, both in the House, and in the Senate, not to mention

among the broader public, is completely wrongheaded. Even when

impeachment articles were first filed against Nixon, the public and the

bulk of the Congress were against the idea. It was during the hearings

that the tide turned, as evidence of malfeasance, criminality and abuse

of power became evident through hearing testimony. The same would

happen in the case of President Bush and/or Vice President Cheney. Most

Americans don’t even know that the president made up evidence to

justify the war against Iraq out of whole cloth. They don’t know what

the Geneva Conventions are with regard to torture. They don’t know why

Congress passed the FISA act, which Bush has been feloniously violating

to spy on them (it was passed because Nixon was using the National

Security Agency to spy on Americans without judicial warrants!). They

don’t know the Bush has been refusing to enact laws passed by the

Congress. Public hearings by an impeachment panel would make all these

high crimes and misdemeanors clear on national TV to all sentient

Americans. Moreover, as Holtzman pointed out, the president would not

be able to use the claim of “executive privilege” to withhold testimony

from aides in an impeachment inquiry, the way he has done when they

have been subpoenaed by other House and Senate committees. Impeachment

would be about violations of the very executive actions he would be

claiming privilege on. As well, an impeachment committee, unlike any

other committee of the Congress, is specifically sanctioned and

empowered in the Constitution, meaning that even strict

“constructionist” Federalists on the bench would have a hard time

backing presidential obstruction.

As Holtzman noted, “There is no executive privilege in impeachment,

because refusing to testify is itself an impeachable offense.”

Committee Republicans, aided by two law professors they had brought

in to testify, Stephen Presser of Northwestern University School of Law

and Jeremy Rabkin of George Mason University School of Law, tried to

argue that impeachment was only meant for crimes in which the official,

or the president, was seeking personal gain. This nonsense was knocked

down by most of the speakers, who quoted numerous founders who made it

clear that what high crimes referred to were actions—even taken with

the noblest of intentions—that undermined the Constitution or abused

the powers of the office. As Rep. Nadler said, “Impeachment has nothing

to do with intentions or with good faith. Impeachment has to do with

abuse of power which weakens the balance of power.”

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