The Clinton impeachment was an abuse of legal and Congressional process, but that doesn’t mean those of us who objected to the abuse should stop using legal and Congressional processes as they were origginally intended.

-F.

wanted to add that about 2000 years a wise rabbi named hillel said something like:

if i am not for others who/what am i?
if i am not for myself what/who am i?
and if not now, when?

if we can’t impeach bring ourselves *right now* to call for abu alberto’s and cheney’s and w’s impeachment, when will be able to make the call?

if not now, when?

Section 8 of Article 1 of the Constitution sets forth Congressional powers…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_the_United_States

What criminal activity Shargash?

I don’t want to try to enumerate all Bush’s “high crimes & misdemeanors”. I’m sure I would forget some important ones, and I’ve already chewed up far more than my fair share of Larry’s bandwidth today.

I think they fall into four general categories. First are specific US statutes & treaties violated by Bush. These include kidnapping (a.k.a. extraordinary rendition), sending people to countries where they will be tortured, authorizing torture (a capital offense for the person authorizing torture, as Bush clearly did, if the torturee dies under torture, as close to 30 people have). I think this also includes the various NSA spying programs (more on them below) and (h/t to Shirin) the invasion of Iraq. This last one, however, is special. I don’t expect the Congress to impeach Bush over that. Congress authorized the war, which makes them accessories.

The second category is failure to carry out or abide by the law. This includes the numerous cases of failing to report to Congress what the president is required to report; also, ignoring laws against political activities in the white house, the white house shadow email system, failure to preserve records, and so forth. I think going around the FISA courts is probably in this category as well. The distinction between this and the first category is arbitrary, I will admit, but these feel different to me.

Thirdly is abuse of power. This includes such things as the firing of the US attorneys, the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence, the treatment of Jose Padilla, and the many US attorneys who weren’t fired because they demonstrated they were loyal Bushies by aggressivly going after Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republicans. Abuse of power involves activities that are normally legitimate uses of power, but the power has been used in illegitimate ways. This is what Madison was talking about in the quote above.

The final category is obstruction of justice. Examples of this include the Scooter Libby commutation, telling Gonzo to lie to Congress (suborning perjury), removing the Abramoff prosecutor in the Marianas islands, the firing of some of the US attorneys to hinder investigations into corrupt Republicans, failure to allow people to testify before congress, and the numerous improper invocations of executive privilege designed to stymie investigations into criminal behavior. Many of these activities are also abuse of power, there being considerable overlap between OOJ & AOP.

Of these things, very few are subject to defunding, for a variety of reasons. The activities may be substantially free (e.g. lying). Others can be operated out of petty cash, funded through alternative means, or exist only in black ops budgets Congess is not allowed to review.

Do you mean the NSA domestic spying program? That is absolutely funded by Congress.

It is not clear to me how Congress could cut off spending for the NSA spying program. The NSA budget is so secret that the whole budget is a black box, and Congress is not allowed to know what NSA spends its money on. We only know about the one NSA program because of leaks.

Congress could reduce the overall NSA budget by the estimated amount of the spying program. However, that is no guarantee that Bush won’t take the money from somewhere else. Trying to defund NSA entirely won’t work. There are provisions in the government for essential services to continue in the event of a shutdown, and I’m sure NSA is on that list (and probably should be). So cutting defunding the NSA won’t stop the spying.

The only thing I can think of that’s left would be to pass an amendment forbidding the use of funds for that spying program.

This is essentially what the Congress did to cut off funding for the Nicaraguan Contras. It is also what the McCain torture amendment did. We all know how well those two examples worked out, which is one of the problems with this approach.

There are other problems. Congress can prohibit all it wants to prohibit, but if it doesn’t get to see what the NSA does, it has no way of knowing if the law is being obeyed. There is nothing to stop Bush from stopping the program to satisfy Congress, and then restarting it in secret. There is evidence he has already done this at least once (the data mining program…can’t think of it’s original code name).

Furthermore, Gonzo’s testimony to Congress indicates that there is at least one other NSA program that we know (literally) nothing about. When asked about it, Gonzo refused to give any information about it at all. Who knows how many other such programs there are that we know nothing about?

Because Congress doesn’t get to see NSA’s line items, I don’t know what Congress could do but pass a very general amendment that would prohibit the use of funds to illegally spy on Americans.

And now we are in Monty Python territory, because that would be little more than passing a law to make it illegal to break the law. If you think that’s just a joke, Specter proposed exactly such a law last year: to make it illegal to bypass FISA, when it is already illegal to bypass FISA.

It is my understanding that there is enough money available now to get all the troops out of there. And make-believe prime minister Al Maliki has given the U.S. the go-ahead to head for the border. So…….?

I will concede that point. Treaties are the supreme law of the land, and I think it is likely true that Bush violated treaties ratified by the US when he did it. However, I still think that defunding the Iraq war is a good idea. It will either curtail the war in Iraq, or it will provoke Bush to shed the last vestiges of being of being the legitimate ruler of the US.

What criminal activity Shargash? Do you mean the NSA domestic spying program? That is absolutely funded by Congress.

1. Firing the US Attorneys.
2. Pardoning Scooter Libby as a reward for covering up crimes in the Plame affair.
3. The plame affair itself
4. Rendering prisoners to foreign countries where they will be tortured.
5. Torture we perform ourselves. Actually, torture that results in the death of the tortured is a capital crime for those who authorized the torture. Bush is good for at least 20-some counts on that one alone.
6. Far too many (ab)uses of government power to unduly influence elections; not all of that may go all the way to Bush & Cheney, but some of it does.
7. Suborning perjury
8. Far too many examples to enumerate of failure to comply with laws that require reporting to Congress or specific statues such as FISA.

That’s just a quick list off the top of my head. I figure a full count of the impeachable offenses we know of would run into the hundreds.

None of those activities I listed require more than pocket change. Some of them, such as failure to obey FISA or most instances of abuse of power and obstruction of justice require no money at all.

In fact the NSA spying is about the only illegal activity I can think of that you could really defund, and even there we only know anything about the one NSA spying program. We know from Gonzos testimony that there is at least one more NSA program we don’t know anything about.

Congress can’t defund illegal activity it doesn’t know about and that is funded out of black ops budgets they’re not allowed to see. When Congress tries to find out about these rumored illegal programs, the president just invokes secrecy in the name of national security, executive privilege, and/or (irony of ironies) separation of powers and the unitary presidency. It is this flat-out refusal to allow Congress to even know what laws he is breaking that is one of the more compelling arguments for impeachment.