White House spokesvermin Tony Snow yesterday just propelled us a little bit further down the path of either tyranny or impeachment:
"You know, Congress has the power of the purse," Snow said, then added: "The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way."
No, he doesn't. If Congress does not allocate funds for a troop increase, then the president is illegally using money appropriated for another purpose. It's that simple, although Senator Kennedy laid it out far more eloquently. Snow also said that he doesn't "want to play junior constitutional lawyer on this." You don't need to be a "junior constitutional lawyer", you just need to have graduated from junior high school to know how foolish this is.
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Dear Congress: Please start Impeachment proceedings immediately. Thank You
I concur. Forcible removal from office is now the only way to stop this madman.
Pick an impeachable offense, any impeachable offense. He's only got a couple dozen (if we fold all the unconstitutional 'signing statement as line-item veto' shenanigans into one offense).
Truly frightening.
-Crow
In the past couple of weeks I've read several obituaries of President Ford. Most mentioned something along the following - he reigned in the "imperial" presidency of Nixon. Now we have Bush and Cheney, who both have vowed to increase the power of the executive at the expense of the other two branches. The 2008 president-elect had better be more like Ford, otherwise we'll be in even deeper trouble than today.
Matt said a mouthful. We can only wait and hope the electorate will do better this next time.
Ford didn't 'reign in' squat. His pardon of Nixon *preserved* the power of the imperial presidency, to the extent to which it was possible. Remember that Nixon only faced impeachment because a whole string of things had gone wrong.
The burglars got caught, the investigation didn't peter out, the cut-outs failed, bureaucratic and political methods of stopping the investigation didn't work, a federal judged ruled that Nixon did have to turn over evidence (the tape), Nixon had gathered that evidence about his crimes with those tapes, Nixon had not wiped every single tape much earlier, as soon as it was conceivable that they might be compromising, Nixon had taped those converstations which were even potentially compromising in the first place, the media didn't have the professional GOP shills that it does now, the media didn't have the unadbashedly GOP shill nextworks that it does now, a number of Democratic Congressmen had spines and b*lls, a number of GOP Congressmen had some integrity,
and on top of all of that, the political situation was such that enough people distrusted him and the American government.
If only a few of those many things didn't line up the way that they did, the storm would have happened, or would have blown over.
What Ford did was to show that, even when every other preventative had failed, a high-ranking GOP criminal president was still to be protected from the law.
Did Ford rein in his horsey or did he reign during the Nixon Dynasty?
Should Bush be impeached prior to removal of Cheney from office? Can they be impeached together?