Where do you stand?
According to a 7/13/07 episode of The Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, 45% of Americans favor initiating impeachment hearings against the President, and 55% favor initiating impeachment hearings against the Vice President. These figures surprised me a little. To be sure, everyone is pretty much terribly unhappy with the administration at this point, but I haven't heard anyone but the zealots yelling for heads.

It made me consider my own thoughts. Thoughts that are buried way beneath layers of confusion, sadness, anger and distrust over the current state of our country. Somewhere beneath my emotions lies my logic and rationale, and I'm usually pretty good at taking a detached look at things. After consideration, I fervently support impeachment, and I'd like to show you why. So let me lay out my reasons, faithful reader. All sources are listed at the end of this post.

What actions are impeachable?
Gotta start with this. Article Two, Section 4 of the Constitution:
"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."

At its most literal, this simply means no one in the Executive office is above the law. You break the law, no matter how minor, you can be impeached. This is how Clinton got himself into hot water by committing perjury during sworn testimony. However, further meaning can be extrapolated. For the framers of the Constitution, impeachment was a critical and powerful component of the democratic process. Tyranny and monarchical behavior was to be tolerated at no cost, so giving power of impeachment to the legislative body was an important part of our checks and balances.

In the Constitutional conventions and Federalist papers, they basically say that an executive can be impeached not only for breaking the law, but for malpractice or neglect of duty, abuse of power, etc. (the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" is centuries-old phrase borrowed from English Parliamentary government that essentially means this). You could go so far as to include "conduct unbecoming." Hence, even if Clinton never lied under oath, an argument could have been made for his impeachment if his randy behavior damaged the executive office or the country.

Has our current President and Vice President committed impeachable offenses?
Well, there's a simple answer to this question. If you think our leadership is incompetent and doing a terrible job, then they can be impeached. End of discussion. Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin said so.

I think that ends the discussion for some right there, but for the sake of argument, let's outline a couple of specifics. A lot of the zealots are claiming that Bush and Cheney are war criminals because of their invasion of a sovereign country under false pretenses, yada yada. I'm going to ignore that huge pink elephant for the moment for 2 reasons:
a- I can make my case without mentioning the mishandling of Iraq.
b- I truly don't believe the White House lied about the main reason for entering the war (WMDs). They had bad intelligence and sold everyone on it, but I don't think they knew it was bad. It doesn't make sense for them to make up "Saddam has WMDs!" if they knew he didn't have any, because they would be busted when we went over there and discovered no WMDs. To complete the lie they would have to have planted something over there, LAPD-style.

Iraq notwithstanding, the President has committed 2 main offenses that should be critically examined.

1- A direct quote from Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein (a conservative who drafted the first article of impeachment against President Clinton): "In approximately 800 cases, President Bush has both signed a bill and declared his intent to disregard provisions he believes are unconstitutional, the equivalent of a line-item veto. For instance, he signed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 prohibiting torture while issuing a signing statement declaring his intent to ignore the law in order to gather military or foreign intelligence."

Signing statements or line-item veto is in direct violation of the Constitution. The president can either approve a bill in its entirety or veto a bill in its entirety, nothing else. President Bush asked for line-item veto way back when, didn't get it, and has been using it anyway.

2- The issue of arrest and detainment of foreign and domestic citizens is a huge can of worms, but basically it goes like this: The current administration has explicitly outlined that they can detain anyone, U.S. citizen, Iraqi or otherwise, that the President believes to be "illegal combatants." Since they are "illegal combatants," they are not subject to the laws of due process or the Geneva Convention. The President has exercised this power on both foreign and domestic soil. He's also authorized warantless wiretapping, in direct violation of law that was enacted after Nixon did the same thing.

So what about this VP of ours? What's he done? At this point there's no question he's the chief architect of White House policy, so at the very least he's a contributor to all of all this. The Washington Post has a great feature on Cheney's unprecedented power. No VP before has even come close. There are 2 main issues at stake in this regard.

1- Bush has delegated much of his power and responsibility to Cheney, which one could argue violates the spirit of the Constitution (an impeachable offense according to the founding fathers). I also believe it definitely violates section 3 of the 25th Amendment, which basically says if the President for some reason can't fulfill his duties, he may transmit them to the Vice President after submitting written declaration of doing so to Congress. No such declaration was ever made.

2- Probably the part I'm most disturbed about is the Vice President's intentional cloaking of the actions of the White House, and consolidation of power to the executive office. The founding fathers demanded that our government, especially the Executive, be transparent (remember the whole fear of monarchy thing). The Congress is supposed to always be aware of what the Executive is doing. But Cheney has willfully invoked executive privilege to conceal secrets about intelligence-gathering programs, the whole U.S. attorney firing thing and the whole Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame spy thing. According to the Washington Post article, way back in 1980 he made a note: "Restore power & auth to Exec Branch." This attitude, in both philosophy and practice during his tenure, represents the most willful trampling of the Constitution and direct affront to the intentions of its framers.

So if Bush and Cheney have done these things, which is surely more grievous than the previous President lying about a sexual affair, why isn't the cry for impeachment louder, especially considering how everyone is disgusted at the state of things? Even now that the Democrats have control of Congress, they aren't pushing the issue. So the legislature is partly to blame for not enforcing its constitutional right to keep the executive office in check.

But above all, we are to blame. It is our responsibility to hold our leaders accountable. As JFK said, we can decide whether we use power or whether power uses us. Speaking of which, let's just end this thing with quotes from guys who are a lot better with words than me.

"In time of war the laws are silent."
-Cicero

"If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

"For in a democracy, every citizen, regardless of his interest in politics, 'hold office'; everyone of us is in a position of responsibility; and, in the final analysis, the kind of government we get depends upon how we fulfill those responsibilities. We, the people, are the boss, and we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve."
-John F. Kennedy

http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=1969&wit_id=5482 - Bruce Fein's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on why President's use of signing statements is unconstitutional.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/watergatedoc.htm - hugely thorough explanation of impeachment, its history and constitutional basis
http://slate.com/id/2169292/ - opinion article on why Cheney should be impeached
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/ - Cheney power feature - posted by R @ 11:05 PM