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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
8, 2006
What's Next?
Election
Postmortem
By DAVE LINDORFF
Here's the way to look at the Election
Day outcome: If the U.S. were a parliamentary democracy, Bush
would be history. Our self-proclaimed "war president"
has lost a vote of confidence, not by the members of his party,
but by the people of the United States.
Of course, we don't live in
a parliamentary democracy, so we're still stuck with the same
megalomaniacal leader, even though the control of the Congress
appears to be passing to the opposition party. (As of this writing,
the new House will be firmly in the hands of the Democrats by
a bigger margin than the current House is in the hands of Republicans,
and the Senate appears headed towards Democratic control also,
albeit by the narrowest of margins: 1 Lieberman.)
So the question is: what next?
We're already hearing a lot
from the mainstream media about how this was all about voters
wanting less extremism and more civility in government.
Bull!
This was about voters who have
had it with neocon imperialist militarism, had it with government
lying, had it with corruption, and had it with campaign tactics
that equate opposition to the president with support for terrorism.
We'll also be hearing a lot
about how a change of 30 or 32 seats in the House from one party
to another is no big deal.
Nonsense! Not only is it a
big deal by historical standards--it is an especially big deal
given the historically unprecedented extreme to which the Republicans
in control of state legislatures had gerrymandered districts
over the last decade to insure their candidates' re-election.
It is also an unusually big turnover to occur at a time when
the nation has over 160,000 troops tied down in bitter fighting
in two countries--Iraq and Afghanistan. To have the public undercut
the president at such a time is an extraordinary act by the voters,
who normally tend towards jingoistic support of presidents when
American troops are dying.
Of course it's true that some
of the Democrats who will be replacing Republican office-holders
are conservative (some are liberal, too). That's not the point,
though. They are almost all honorable people who entered their
races as underdogs earlier this year, not expecting to win, and
who ended up winning because the voting public, whether liberal
or conservative, wants them to clean the Stygian Stables, which
have filled up with six years with of crap and bullshit.
Now the Democratic leadership
in Congress doesn't see it that way. They seem to be buying into
the media illusion that what the public wants is civility in
government and respect for the president. That's certainly how
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the likely new House majority leader, puts
it (even though her home district in San Francisco voted 61 percent
for an impeachment resolution).
But civility and respect are
not going to get the job done.
First of all, let's consider
that there are still two possibilities: one is that the two houses
of Congress both go narrowly Democratic; the other is that only
the House goes Democratic, while the Senate ends up more narrowly
Republican, or perhaps tied, with Dick Cheney holding the tie-breaking
vote as President of the Senate. In the latter two scenarios
civility would be death, since Senate Republicans would be anything
but civil. The only way Democrats could have any power would
be by acting as obstreperously and obstructively as possible,
to prevent more damage, by using their investigative power in
the House to lay out the crimes of this administration as clearly
as possible. If both houses of Congress end up in Democratic
hands, they will be in the position to start passing legislation.
But they will not be able to undo the damage caused over the
past six years to the Constitution and to the nation because
Bush will be able to veto their bills. Worse yet, even if they
can manage in some cases to get enough Republican support on
some issues to override a veto, Bush will use his "signing
statement" ploy to block them, as he has already done over
800 times to legislation passed by a Republican Congress.
Clearly, in either event, the
only appropriate response is for a Democratic House to initiate
serious investigations into administration abuse of power, criminality,
deceit and incompetence, and ultimately, to initiate impeachment
proceedings.
It is perhaps wishful thinking
to believe that Bush, as richly as he deserves it, will be impeached
for war crimes. We can leave that to future prosecutors, either
in a better post-Bush America or in other nations, since war
crimes don't have a statute of limitations, and Bush has a good
20 years left in him if he manages to stay off the bottle.
That said, there are crimes
and constitutional violations that even Republicans should agree
call for his impeachment (and in some cases Cheney's). Among
these are:
* The signing statements, in
which Bush claims that as commander in chief he does not need
to accept or enforce laws passed by the Congress. This is such
an egregious abuse of power and undermining of the Constitution
that if it is allowed to continue, with future presidents continuing
the practice and citing Bush as precedent, Congress will cease
to have any real constitutional function.
* The NSA warrantless spying.
Democrats need to take a leadership role and demand to know what
this program is all about. Clearly it's not about spying on suspected
terrorists, as Bush claims, because the secret Foreign Surveillance
Intelligence Court judges would have no problem approving warrants
for that. It has to be something so outrageous that Bush is afraid
to present it to those famously accommodating judges. The case
needs to be made that this is a flat-out felony and a breach
of the Fourth Amendment, and that it has already been so ruled
by a federal judge.
* The outing of CIA undercover
agent Valerie Plame and the selective release of the Iraq National
Intelligence Estimate in an effort to damage a critic--Plame's
husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. This was exactly the
kind of abuse of government power that led to an impeachment
article being voted in the House Judiciary Committee against
President Richard Nixon. Moreover, Democrats need to make the
case that this attack on Wilson was motivated by a darker goal:
the need to discredit someone who was exposing one of the Bush
administration's gravest crimes--namely faking evidence of an
active Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
* Lying the country into a
deadly, costly and interminable war in Iraq. It is clear now
that Bush knew the uranium ore story, the aluminum tubes story,
the Saddam links to Al Qaeda story and the germ weapons story,
were all lies. It is clear that Bush had plans to invade Iraq
from before he even assumed office in 2001, that 9/11 was just
a pretext to do it, and that his claims to the American people
and to Congress that he wanted a "diplomatic solution"
to Iraq's alleged WMD threat was a lie and a fraud. He must be
impeached for this bloody travesty.
* Obstruction and lying to
the Congress and the 9-11 Commission. The president, in what
is an abuse of power and possibly even an act of treason, refused
to provide testimony and evidence demanded by the Senate Intelligence
Committee and by the 9-11 Commission, and himself refused to
testify under oath or with any record being made of his answers,
and had members of his administration lie to both bodies. This
willful obstruction has put the nation in jeopardy, since without
knowing what went wrong or even what went on before and on 9-11,
there is no way to prevent another such attack. This is a clear
impeachable crime.
* Bribery. For some time it
was not clear whether the stench of money scandals would reach
into the White House. Bush claimed he didn't even know Jack Abramoff,
even as members of Congress were falling like 10-pins. Now, however,
we have learned that there are myriad pictures of Abramoff and
his buddy Bush together, that Abramoff visited the White House
so often it was practically a second home, and that he even managed
to have his own secretary move over to work for Bush's closest
confident (and "brain" by some accounts) Karl Rove,
the better to facilitate the money-for-favors exchanges. This
is corruption on the scale of the Warren Harding administration,
and it calls for impeachment, not respect. While they"re
at it, Democrats in the House should also investigate the oil
industry's and Halliburton's financial tentacles in the White
House and Blair House.
* The Loss of New Orleans.
Bush's disastrous inaction as Katrina headed for New Orleans,
and his even worse inaction after the disaster was apparent,
is a classic violation of the presidential oath to "take
care" that the laws are faithfully administered. The president
had a duty to initiate drastic emergency action that only he
could authorize, and instead he campaigned, played golf and guitar,
and entertained Sen. John McCain, while over a thousand Americans
were allowed to die and a major US city drowned. That is a clear
impeachable offense.
American voters don't want
politeness. We want our country back. We have just proved to
Republicans that we will punish lying and corruption. In the
next election, Democrats should be on notice that we will also
punish cowardice and inaction.
A great start for newly empowered
Democrats would be to revoke or rephrase the September 2001 Authorization
for Use of Military Force, which was passed to authorize Bush
to invade Afghanistan and to pursue Al Qaeda. Bush has been claiming
ever since that the 2001 AUMF made him permanent "commander
in chief" in an unending "War" on Terror, with
the right to ignore the courts and acts of Congress. It is clearly
in Congress's power to redefine that AUMF more clearly, to make
it unambiguously clear that it did not authorize the president
to be generalissimo, that it was referring exclusively to combat
outside the U.S., that it expects him to stay within the law
and the Constitution under the resolution, and that the AUMF
itself in any case has an expiration date. This is a move that
even some Republicans--especially after their recent drubbing--will
support.
The new Congress should also
promptly revoke the military commissions law, and especially
the parts that revoke habeas corpus, that grant the president
and his gang retroactive immunity from prosecution for authorizing
torture, and that undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, making it
easier for a president to declare martial law. Again, it should
be possible to get significant Republican support for this effort.
Although it doesn't deserve
it, the Democratic Party has by default been given a chance in
this off-year election. So far, the leadership is showing every
sign of preparing to blow it.
That means it's up to us voters
to make sure elected Democrats in Congress get the message, first
by voting them into power, and then by riding them hard to make
sure they take aggressive action to put the administration in
the dock and rescue the Constitution and the country. A good
start would be to go to Starting
an Impeachment Movement.
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