Impeaching Bush

Foreign Policy is running a web-only story on their website titled The Case Against George W. Bush. Go read it. To me, this signifies that the Washington political establishment, the constructors of conventional wisdom, now believe that whether or not to impeach is a legitimate debate.

One of the key problems in impeaching Bush is the question of what to impeach him for - his list of misdeeds, lies and political crimes is so long it will be difficult to pick a single issue out of the mix to focus on. Elizabeth Holtzman (the author of the FP piece) picks two. The strongest legal case is the warrantless NSA wiretapping. The strongest political case is the war in Iraq, specifically the claim about uranium from Niger. It all comes down to the clause from article 2, section 3 of the Constitution:
he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed
Difficult to do when you have John Yoo legitimizing that voice inside your head that tells you you're above the law.

4 comments:

Jay@Soob said...

How could it be proven that Bush willfully mislead rather than was, himself, mislead?

Adrian said...

Subadei - Thanks for the comment.

I'm not sure thought that it matters so much whether he's mislead himself - he still did not "take care that the laws were faithfully executed."

Jay@Soob said...

And neither did the congress that overwhelmingly voted in favor of the Iraq initiative. Should they all be impeached?

Adrian said...

Well as the article pointed out, the strongest case legally is the NSA wiretapping, which Congress couldn't have signed off on because it was purposefully kept unaware it was happening.

The illegal bit would be from the executive branch for purposefully misleading Congress. The Iraq invasion involved no illegal activity from Congress, just stupidity (it wasn't exactly difficult to mislead them, but there's no constitutional requirement to be smart).