Principle Over Politics – The Case For Impeachment

By ACLU – Central Florida Chapter, OpEdNews

Principles over Politics:

The Case for Supporting Impeachment

A Proposal from the Central Florida ACLU to all Florida Chapters

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, on November 20, 2007, the ACLU Board of Central Florida approved a Resolution in support of impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The language of the Resolution is as follows:

The ACLU Board of Central Florida urges the Florida State ACLU Board to encourage the ACLU National Board to lobby the House of Representatives to file, without delay, articles of impeachment against George Bush, President, and Richard Cheney, Vice President, for grave and repeated violations of the U.S. Constitution. We urge the Florida State Board to persuasively communicate this vote to the ACLU National Board.

The vote in favor of the Resolution was not taken lightly. The board discussed the litany of constitutional violations committed by Bush and Cheney since 2000. In addition, the board discussed the decision by the ACLU of Southern California on November 14, 2007 to support impeachment hearings against Bush and Cheney. Finally, the board discussed Jeanne Baker and Howard Simon’s comments regarding impeachment in their e-mail of November 20, 2007. After considering the above, and with only three board members absent from the meeting, the Resolution was approved by all the board members present.

The Central Florida Board would like to take this opportunity to explain why we made this decision. Furthermore, we would like to address the concerns and positions raised by Jeanne and Howard in their e-mail, which has already been circulated around the state in anticipation of this proposal. Most importantly, the Central Florida Board urges all of the Florida Chapters to consider our Case for Supporting Impeachment and to sign on to the above Resolution.

Why Impeachment?

“We seek to provide you a means by which to effect the peaceful overthrow of a tyranny. There should be no mistake about it, a usurper has acquired power in America. He seeks to make it absolute. He and his aides lie to us on television and berate us for our disbelief. He speaks to us flanked by a photograph of family and our flag which he wears on his lapel. Beside him stares a bust of Abraham Lincoln. He confesses to crimes against the Constitution and believes he speaks of exoneration…”

The words above are the opening lines of an ACLU pamphlet written by Charles J. Morgan, Jr., the National Legislative Director of the ACLU in 1973, concerning the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Coincidentally, a few months after the publication of this pamphlet, the House Judiciary Committee rapidly recommended three Articles of Impeachment against Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Confronted with probable impeachment and removal by Congress, President Nixon resigned shortly thereafter.

In retrospect, the violations committed by the Nixon Administration seem quaint in comparison to the graver violations committed by the Bush Administration. A casual glance at our ACLU national website provides ample documentation of the Bush Administration’s evisceration of our Nation’s Charter: torture and abuse of prisoners, extraordinary rendition, warrantless surveillance, the elimination of habeas corpus, the politicization of the Department of Justice, and more than a dozen unanswered congressional subpoenas issued on these and other topics. Articles of Impeachment for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, contempt of Congress, and on other grounds are certainly in order on these violations alone.

However, it is important to add that the above list of abuses are violations of law within the traditional sphere of concern of the ACLU. In other words, there are many other grounds for impeachment that should be mentioned although they lie outside that sphere, including lying to Congress and the American People about Iraq, committing the crime of aggression by initiating war against Iraq, committing crimes against humanity in the conduct of the occupation of Iraq, the leaking of classified information, and threatening a war of aggression against Iran.

The documentation on our national website concerning the abovementioned impeachable offenses is such that it requires no further elaboration here. Consequently, the question should not be, “Why Impeachment?” Instead, the proper question should be, “Why Not Impeachment?”

Principles over Politics

“It cannot be stressed strongly enough or often enough that Representatives who do not move to impeach, and who thereby fail to bring President Nixon to trial, are accomplices to a cover-up.” – Charles J. Morgan, Jr., the National Legislative Director of the ACLU, October 1973.

A few national pundits have amused their readers by attempting to imagine under what conditions President Bush and Vice President Cheney could be impeached. It is difficult to imagine, after all, since they have nearly exhausted the gamut of major constitutional offenses and have yet to face a serious impeachment threat. Even a tacit policy of ethnic cleansing, which has been adopted by the Bush Administration for the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq, has been accepted in our country with hardly a whimper, let alone with the outrage that such a criminal policy deserves. Perhaps only a full-blown act of genocide committed by Bush and Cheney would merit serious consideration for impeachment. However, given the cynicism that characterizes much of our nation’s current political climate, even an act of genocide could go unpunished.

The ACLU’s stated mission is to preserve the protections and guarantees provided by the Bill of Rights plus the three post-Civil War amendments and the 19 th Amendment. When faced with serious abuses of these protections and guarantees in the 1970s, the ACLU acted to correct these violations by, among other things, aggressively supporting the impeachment of Nixon. This decisive action won the ACLU a great deal of credibility as well as many new members dedicated to defending the Constitution.

In stark contrast to the ACLU’s decisiveness and commitment to principles in the 1970s, today’s national leadership has been infused with a large dose of political cynicism. Our national organization recognizes that grave and impeachable crimes have been committed, but refuses to endorse impeachment since this course of action is not considered politically expedient. In our opinion, the ACLU’s support or lack of support for impeachment should not be based on political calculations that are suspiciously similar to the calculations delineated by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party. Instead, we believe that our support or lack thereof for this crucial topic should depend on the answer to a single question of principle: have George Bush and Richard Cheney committed and do they continue to commit several grave constitutional offenses that merit impeachment?

The November 20, 2007 e-mail sent by Jeanne Baker and Howard Simon urges Florida Chapters to ask an altogether different question from the question above. The e-mail summarizes the national ACLU’s opposition to taking an organizational stance on impeachment. The e-mail raises several important arguments that we have first summarized and then addressed below:

1. Bush and Cheney are indeed guilty of constitutional crimes, but Congress has also aided and abetted in the commission of these crimes.

There is no question that Congress is complicit in these constitutional violations. We do not believe, however, that congressional complicity exonerates the Executive Branch from impeachment for crimes against the constitution as this argument suggests. In fact, congressional complicity only means that in addition to seeking the impeachment of the renegade Executive, we should also develop a strategy for holding congressional “enablers” responsible. For example, we could encourage a campaign to vote out such Congressmembers as was the implicit policy (see the quote of Charles J. Morgan, Jr. above) of the ACLU during the Nixon impeachment.

2. Pursuing impeachment will let Congress divert attention away from its complicity in permitting these impeachable offenses.

The fact is that with today’s well-behaved national ACLU, Congress is not suffering any adverse consequences as an accomplice to Bush and Cheney crimes. In reality, little or no serious attention is being paid to congressional enabling.

The ACLU’s current policy is, for all practical purposes, impunity for both the White House and the Congress. An aggressive strategy targeting both the Executive and the Legislative Branches would allow us to pursue impeachment of the former while pursuing the “roll-back” of unconstitutional legislation in the latter.

3. Impeachment is largely a symbolic act since Congress refuses to take up the issue and “the votes are not there.”

The issue of impeachment is yet to be sponsored by a major organization like the ACLU, so it remains to be seen whether or not such a policy would be symbolic. However, it does appear that the ACLU’s current “Safe and Free” Campaign has turned out to be a less-than-symbolic act. Under the “Safe and Free” Campaign, Congress has retroactively legitimized many Bush and Cheney’s offenses against the Constitution, which of course has made all of us much less safe and free. The terrible results of this campaign merit revisiting our national strategy and considering a more principled, if not more audacious, approach such as impeachment.

4. Focus on impeachment would divert attention away from the national ACLU’s approach of removing unconstitutional policies piecemeal.

Please refer to the comments above. It is also important to mention that we are not proposing an “either/or” approach. We are free to work on a new and improved “Safe and Free” Campaign targeting Congress while simultaneously working on impeachment.

5. Even if impeachment were successful, the unconstitutional policies would remain in place;

Many of the safeguards undone by the Bush Administration were safeguards passed by Congress in the wake of Watergate, which marked our country’s last major constitutional crisis. At that time, the impeachment drive led to a substantial number of secondary initiatives designed to safeguard our rights and liberties. A successful impeachment drive today would have the desired effect of turning all Bush and Cheney initiatives into substances so toxic and radioactive that nobody would support them. This effect, in turn, would facilitate the rollback in unconstitutional policies that we would be pursuing simultaneously with the impeachment initiative.

6. The ACLU’s current strategy to fix unconstitutional policies has largely failed (“Over the past ten months the organization has poured resources into this fight, believing that a new Democratic majority would be willing to address these issues. Thus far we have been sorely disappointed.”)

We couldn’t agree more, but we are also sorely disappointed that the decision has been made to continue with the failed “Safe and Free” Campaign without considering more vigorous alternatives like impeachment.

Let’s Practice What We Preach ““ and Vote to Impeach

Once again, we believe that the ACLU’s support or lack thereof for this crucial topic should depend on the answer to a single question of principle: have George Bush and Richard Cheney committed and do they continue to commit several grave constitutional offenses that merit impeachment? Our purpose in this proposal has been to persuade you, our fellow chapter colleagues, that this is the predominant question to be asked when considering support for impeachment. We sincerely hope that you will join us in persuading our state organization that we must convince our national organization to make a vigorous call for the House of Representatives to support impeachment proceedings.

Sincerely,

The Central Florida State Board