From John Nichols’ latest column describing remarks by Carl Bernstein about how Bush’s presidency is far more damaging to our country than Nixon’s presidency.
Unlike the often crude and conniving but unquestionably intelligent and highly-engaged 37th president, Bernstein says of Bush: “He’s lazy, arrogant and has little curiosity. He’s a catastrophe…”
But that is not the worst part of the Bush era as compared to the Nixon era, explains Bernstein.
What has made this time dramatically more troubling, the 63-year-old journalist explains, is that “there is no oversight.”
“The system worked in Watergate,” Bernstein told the Denver Post.
Even after Nixon was reelected in a 49-state landslide in 1972, Bernstein said, the president was checked and balanced in the manner intended by the founders of the American experiment.
The news media investigated Nixon, and editorialized boldly when the president’s lawless behaviors were exposed.
The Congress responded to those revelations with hearings and demands for White House tapes and documents. When the materials were not forthcoming, Congress went to court to force Nixon and his aides to meet those demands.
The courts responded by aggressively and consistently upholding the authority of Congress to call the president to account.
And when it became clear that Nixon was governing in contradiction to the Constitution, the U.S. House took appropriate action, with Democrats and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voting for three articles of impeachment. Congressional Republicans, led by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, then went to the White House to inform their party’s president that he stood little chance of thwarting an impeachment vote by the full House or surviving a trial in the Senate.
Nixon resigned and so ended a constitutional crisis created by a president’s disregard for the rule of law — a crisis that was cured by an impeachment move by House members who respected their oaths of office.
Today, says Bernstein, the system that worked in the 1970s is failing as the country witnesses presidential and vice presidential misdeeds that former White House counsel John Dean has correctly characterized as “worse than Watergate.”
Referring to the media, congressional and judicial oversight that is essential to maintaining a republic, Bernstein says, “That hasn’t happened here.”
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