Leverage
As expected, Bush vetoed the “Emergency” War Funding Bill sent to him by Congress. He objected to the timetables for withdrawal.
Congress will have to reconvene to come up with a bill more agreeable to Bush, who wants to retain what has essentially been unlimited power to wage a never ending war.
So should the Democratic Congress cave in to Bush’s demands or should they force their hand? Given that the majority of Americans and the majority of Iraqis want the U.S. out of Iraq, I think they should find a way to force Bush into accepting benchmarks for progress and a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.
Representative John Murtha thinks so to, and he thinks their ace in hand is the threat of impeachment. Last Sunday on Face the Nation he said: “There’s three ways or four ways to influence a president. One is popular opinion, the election, third is impeachment and fourth is the purse.”
Impeachment you say? I like that one. Is it possible? Let me count the ways:
- Bush did not get a majority of UN members to authorize the War against Iraq, but started it anyway – illegally.
- He cherry picked intelligence and advice that supported the goal of removing Saddam Hussein.
- He seized U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and held them indefinitely without charges.
- He broke laws outlined in the Foreign Intelligence Security Act by seizing telephone records of U.S. citizens without warrants and then “data mined” them for foreign intelligence information – a clear violation of the 4th Amendment.
- He refused to grant the prisoners captured in Afghanistan their rights outlined in the Geneva Conventions because he said they were not prisoners of war – they were “enemy combatants.” He then claimed the right to detain the “prisoners” indefinitely on the grounds that prisoners can be detained until the war ends.
- He changed the definition of torture to include acts like water boarding, sleep deprivation, and other acts that were commonly believed to be “torture” and then, when he signed the Military Commissions Act that banned “torture,” he added a signing statement that said he would torture people anyway if he thought it was in the interest of national security.
So yes, they should throw the impeachment card on the table and see how he reacts to letting the bill go through with benchmarks and timetables, and then they should impeach him anyway.
(Impeachable offenses culled from Phil Worden’s excellent column that appeared in The Bangor Daily News this week.)
