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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (9934)	1/27/2006 10:09:01 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 541518

Because of GOP, threat of impeachment can’t check Bush’s power cantonrep.com Friday, January 27, 2006 By MARIE COCCO WASHINGTON - Clinton did it. The most rabid of Bill Clinton’s detractors still mine what they believe to be a trove of irresponsibility unparalleled in presidential history. At the moment, they’ve got a peculiar problem that they perceive is solvable with a twist on the Clinton Solution. They are trying to justify four years of secret, widespread, warrantless snooping on Americans by the Bush White House by drawing a rhetorical parallel to a 1993 search of the home of the Soviet spy Aldrich Ames. It was conducted before Congress had written a law regulating this type of search in a foreign intelligence case, an oversight later remedied with Clinton administration support. The particulars of this silliness are of less importance than the era it brings to mind, when no presidential transgression, real or imagined, went uninvestigated. It reached its zenith with the impeachment of the president for lying about an improper sexual liaison in a lawsuit brought by his political tormentors — a suit later dismissed by a judge. At long last, we see the significance of the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio: It made it impossible to use the tool of impeachment against a president who has swept aside the Constitution and secretly circumvented the law. PREDICTIONS CAME TO PASS A fair number of historians and constitutional experts said during the Clinton scandal that pursuing the president for such a weightless matter would trivialize the nature of impeachment and weaken the ultimate constitutional check on presidential power. In President Bush, we have a leader who has imprisoned American citizens without charge or evidence. He has tried to thwart the Supreme Court by maneuvering around its ruling that a president does not have unilateral, unfettered power over wartime detainees. Now he admits to a vast spying operation without court oversight or authorization, an end run around the law written to regulate such surveillance. Bush claims he can do this anyway and vows to continue. Yet politics will not permit a consequence. Save for Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, Republicans have been largely mute. Congressional Democrats are outraged, but uttering the I-word would invite the cable-TV yakkers to brand them hopeless partisans. In truth, the public would have no stomach for another impeachment drama, and that exposes the problem. The Clinton affair was never a constitutional crisis. It was political theater. Now we’ve got a genuine crisis, and no way to resolve it while still recovering from the Lewinsky hangover. Specter himself seems to say so. WHAT’S THE PRICE? In a recent interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, he spelled out the remedy — theoretically, he insists — for a president who breaks or circumvents the law: “Impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution. But the principal remedy, George, under our society is to pay a political price.” How could Bush pay a price? He does not stand for re-election. Voters would have to punish congressional Republicans, but they, too, were kept in the dark about the surveillance program. Republican lawmakers often said they were pursuing President Clinton for his transgressions because otherwise, “what would we tell the children?” What we’re telling them now is that there is a partisan double standard under which some presidents really are above the law.