Overlooking the Obvious

     

On Impeachment

 


By Hank Edson

Does One More Outrage Really Matter?

It may seem completely unnecessary to pursue yet one more ground for impeachment when we already have so many. In their book, The Case for Impeachment, journalists David Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky have cited, for example, seven classes of impeachable offenses Bush and Cheney have committed:

  1. Lying to Congress and America about the need to invade Iraq, about the existence of an imminent threat to the United States, and about the existence of a link between that alleged threat and 9/11.
  2. Refusing to cooperate with congressional and 9/11 investigations;
  3. Violating the bill of rights by detaining US citizens indefinitely without charge, by detaining and deporting legal residents, and by illegally authorizing the national Security Agency to spy on American citizens without a court order.
  4. Abusing power by adding over 1000 signing statements to legislative acts passed by Congress.
  5. Obstructing justice in the investigation of the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA operative, and possibly intentionally leaking Plame’s identity as a means of retaliating against Plame’s husband who accused Bush of making false statements in his State of the Union address.
  6. Committing criminal negligence in failing to appropriately prepare and respond to Hurricane Katrina.
  7. Committing war crimes, including the authorization, use and cover up of the “extraordinary rendition” policy of kidnapping and torture of suspected enemies in violation of the Geneva convention and by committing a “crime against peace” under the Nuremberg Charter by waging a war of aggression.

Others, such as Elizabeth Holtzman and Elizabeth de la Vega have added additional criminal negligence and war crime offenses, but propose a similar grouping of classes of offenses as do Lindorff and Olshansky. I want to talk about an additional class: Election Theft.

It may seem a pointless exercise to do so. No one is doing anything about impeachment as it stands. No one did anything about the theft of the election in 2000. No one did anything about the theft of the election in 2004. How can combining all these “no one did anything’s” in one more futile plea for action be worth a moment of our thought in these trying times of war, debt, economic instability, global warming, and the daily grind?

And yet, it’s the sheer obviousness of the offense that compels me to address it. Let’s step back for a moment and consider a useful analogy to impeachable offenses: war crimes.

The Supreme Impeachable Offense

Robert Jackson, who served both as chief prosecutor of the major Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials and as U.S. Supreme Court Justice, provided a fundamental criteria for evaluating the severity of an offense. He did so when he described starting a war without cause as the “supreme war crime.” Starting a war without cause was worse that all the others because all the other war crimes depended upon the existence of the war to begin with in order for them to occur. Following this logic, stealing an election is the “supreme impeachable offense” because all of the other impeachable offenses Bush and Cheney committed depended upon their stolen power in order to occur.

Put another way, if they used force to get in, we, the people ought to use force to get them out.

What happens in the interval of forcing in and being forced out only added insult to injury. In Bush and Cheney’s case—admittedly—the insult included torture, kidnapping, spying on Americans, and the commission of a democratic sacrilege upon the hallowed floor of the House of Representatives when Bush lied to congress and the American people during the State of the Union address about the reason he wanted to go to war. But none of this could have happened—not the war, not the war’s more than 1 million deaths, not the unprecedented budget deficit, not the irreparable harm to America’s reputation—if Bush and Cheney had not first stolen the presidency. And they didn’t just do it once, but twice!

Archaic to the Point of Being Useless

One of the obstacles we have encountered in attempting to build enough political pressure to force impeachment is that the legal standard applied is literally archaic. The legal standard for impeachment is found in Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution. It states, “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Together, this standard and the impeachment and conviction process represent a type of technology central to the exercise of our humanity as a society.

Significantly, as the rest of the world has progressed, as the American Revolution has been followed by the industrial revolution, and the industrial revolution has been followed by corporate conquest, and as corporate conquest has been followed by the accelerating innovations of scientifically advanced technology, our 230-year-old impeachment standard has been abandoned in time to its antique condition.

According to Elizabeth Holtzman, the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” is a relic of English law dating back to the 14th century. Because the phrase is not defined, legislators have a hard time insisting upon prosecution under these grounds. As it happens, impeachment on the other grounds specified in the Constitution is almost non-existent. Thus, Gerald Ford famously defined an impeachable offense as “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

We have allowed our legal standard for impeachment to languish in the ambiguity of archaic oblivion. As a result, it is not a legal standard at all, but merely a license for the legislature to ignore severe abuses of power, as in the case of George Bush and Dick Cheney, or to commit itself a politically motivated abuse of power, as in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

But it is not just the phrase, “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” that has become so antiquated as to be utterly useless. The ground of treason also badly needs a technological upgrade.

Treason

There are a variety of definitions for the term treason. Our Constitution states in Article III, Section 3 that “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Like the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” this definition, as a standard for impeachment, is completely inadequate to the reality of 21st century America. Of course it is possible that the people who control the United States Government might have risen to power as spies for a foreign power, but we really ought to ask: if someone rose to the presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth, why would they surrender that power to another country? Wouldn’t they do better just to keep the power for themselves?

Some nations, in fact, don’t define treason so much as giving aid to a foreign enemy as overthrowing the legitimate government. Others have included in its definition the murdering of the government’s leader. There is indeed an archaic aura around the notion of treason that communicates an unsurpassed outrage against humanity stemming from more brutal times in history when taking over the government meant getting close to the King and killing him with your sword. Of course, as a ground for impeaching a president, this standard is absurd. No president can usurp the power he already possesses and certainly not by self-inflicted murder!

Therefore, we have to think about what treasons means as a ground for impeachment against a president and vice-president who already rule the government. Of course, the old definition might make more sense in impeaching a wayward attorney general, or even a vice-president who did not already control the government through his presidential puppet. But treason is not listed first among the grounds for impeachment for no reason. It is high time we updated the meaning of treason in the context of impeachment so that it applies to more modern methods for overthrowing our government: such as election theft. The day we start prosecuting individuals involved in stealing our elections for treason is the day election theft loses its appeal as a political option.

Still spellbound by the violent aura that surrounds the term of treason? Does treason seem far too extreme a charge to levy against someone who is merely stealing votes? Remember that stealing elections is the supreme impeachable offense. It makes sense that it ultimately equates to the ground for impeachment listed first in the legal standard. Also consider the nature of democracy. Democracy replaced the King with a Political Process. Regicide may have been the ultimate expression of treason in a monarchy, but election theft is the ultimate expression of treason in a democracy. It is not our president who is overthrown, but our political process.

In one sense, the injury in overthrowing the government is the same in both democracy and monarchy, but one can also argue that the injury of overthrowing the political process in a democracy is greater by far than overthrowing a King in a monarchy. A democracy has more value to humanity than a monarchy. Democracy, as a form of government, better serves our human rights and the legitimate authority of the people to govern by self-determination. Monarchy, as a form of government, is tyrannical, authoritarian, and abusive.

When the king is dead, he is not necessarily missed. The one who replaces him is not much different. When a democracy is dead, however, every individual in the nation mourns the death of his or her human rights. The government that follows is awful to the people. A fragile, precious, wondrous advance for all humankind has been murdered whenever an election is stolen.

The people who steal the election have the sophistication to recognize they can overthrow the government without using violence, but the people of America do not yet seem to have the sophistication to recognize the monumental injury inflicted when Bush and Cheney stole the elections of 2000 and 2004. I say it was treason and I say it is grounds for impeachment.

Were the 2000 and 2004 Elections Really Stolen?

People, for crying out loud! Yes, the 2000 and 2004 elections were really stolen! Were we to impeach Bush and Cheney on the grounds that they authorized and benefitted from the theft of the 2000 and 2004 elections, we would certainly find out more than what we already known, but what we already know makes the thefts a virtual certainty. In particular, the investigative journalism of Greg Palast into the theft of the 2000 election and the investigative journalism of Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman into the theft of the 2004 election have unearthed sufficient evidence to make these thefts a virtual certainty. I have summarized some of these findings in earlier blog posts, such as:

Who knows whether our legislature will remedy the injustice done the American people by the Bush/Cheney administration by impeaching these two unconscionable and illegitimate rulers? Who know whether the American people will ever acquire the sophistication to acknowledge that the last two presidential elections have been stolen from them? One thing is sure, however. Democratic government is based on principles which compel logical conclusions even when we are not ready to accept them. Our democratic principles require us to redefine the term treason and our standard of impeachment so that both account for the grave injury election theft inflicts upon a democratic nation. Our democratic principles require us to hold responsible for election theft the politicians placed in office through such theft. If such politicians presume to lead our nation, they must first take responsibility for the conduct of their political campaigns.  In a mature and sophisticated democratic society, impeachment is the prices a president and vice president pay when leaders in their political campaign subvert the integrity of the political process and deny the people their truly chosen leaders.

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Copyright © Hank Edson 2007