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Efforts to impeach George W. Bush

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President George W. Bush has seen calls for his impeachment.

The phrase "Movement to impeach George W. Bush" for the purpose of this article is used in two ways. It is used to describe actions by individuals and groups within the public and private spheres intended to support an impeachment of US President George W. Bush. The phrase is also used in a more broad sense to refer to a social movement, related to public opinion polls, including both Democrats and Republicans, which indicate a degree of public support for a Presidential impeachment.

Reasons cited for impeachment are many and varied but for example include unresolved questions about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the authorization to conduct domestic wiretaps without a warrant controversy. Those who have voiced support for impeachment include members of Congress, public opinion polls and demonstrations, various politicians and government officials, scholars, authors, organizations and members of the media. The political affiliation of those calling for impeachment is bi-partisan, including members from the political left and groups affiliated or supportive of anti-war causes, and also some on the right.

There are no impeachment hearings nor is an impeachment vote scheduled.

Background

Impeachment in the US is the process by which charges of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" are formally leveled at a sitting US President. The articles of impeachment, stating the charges, are delivered to the House of Representatives where they are voted upon. If the impeachment is approved, the president is then tried by the United States Senate to determine his guilt or innocence. If a President is convicted, he would be removed from office and replaced by the Vice President, who is currently Richard Cheney.

There have been nine formal attempts to impeach a US President. Four of these resulted in articles being referred to the House of Representatives: John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Of these four, only two were actually impeached by the House: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. (Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency before the House could actually vote.) Both Presidents Johnson and Clinton were acquitted by the Senate following their subsequent trials. In addition there have been numerous impeachment movements of various sizes directed at visible members of the government, most notably the movement to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren.

In the case of George W. Bush, some members of Congress have issued press releases and introduced resolutions.

Critics of the movement, on both the left and the right, state that a sitting chief executive has never been removed by conviction in the Senate and only one resigned under threat of impeachment. They also point out that getting a Congressional investigation while the Republican Party is in control of the House of Representatives is improbable. Many critics on the right dispute the allegations made in their entirety, or they deny that the actions of the Bush administration officials currently under investigation constitute anything more than normal handling of politics and national security matters, or are, at worst, legal technicalities.

Reasons

Reasons often cited for impeachment include:

An explanation of the grounds for impeachment was given in a recent memo to Rep. Conyers from attorney Bonifaz.

Among the charges proposed by Ramsey Clark against the Bush administration are the following:

Many activists charge that Bush committed obstruction of Congress, a felony under 18 U.S.C. 1001, by withholding information and by supplying information Bush should have known to be incorrect in his States of the Union speeches. This law is comparable to perjury, but it does not require that the statements be made under oath. Martha Stewart recently went to prison for violating this law by making false statements to investigators. Caspar Weinberger was indicted under this law in relation to his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, but he escaped prosecution by being pardoned by Bush's father.

A number of legislators, journalists, bloggers and citizen activist groups see the heretofore secret Downing Street memo as proof that Bush was willingly and knowingly untruthful about Iraq's possession of WMDs, and had lied in the year (2002) leading up to the Iraqi Invasion of 2003, and that the president intentionally planned to invade Iraq regardless of whether or not Iraq has any such weapons. Congressional Democrats sponsored both a request for documents and a resolution of inquiry. The minority party does not have subpoenas power, and therefore cannot force the production of documents.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special prosecutor investigating the Plame affair, has subpoenaed phone records made from Air Force One, and the court filings in support of these subpoena's have alleged "serious breaches of security." The closeness of Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby to the president and vice-president respectively has led Frank Rich to draw comparisons to Watergate in recent columns.

Official Democratic Party organizations, including the DCCC and the DSCC have used phrases such as "worse than Watergate" and accused Bush and the Republicans of "abuse of power". The latter phrase is significant because "abuse of power" was the meaning attached to the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" in the Constitution's impeachment standard by Congress in the Impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon. To date, neither organization has endorsed impeachment explicitly.

Congressional activities

Representative Conyers

According to Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law at the University of Illinois School of Law , on March 11, 2003, Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) convened "an emergency meeting of forty or more of his top advisors, most of whom were lawyers, to discuss and debate immediately putting into the House of Representatives Bills of Impeachment against President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Ashcroft in order to head off the impending war." Conyers is the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction over any Bill of Impeachment.

In May, 2005, Conyers began collecting signatures on a letter to President Bush requesting answers to the questions raised by the Downing Street Memo. Conyers delivered a letter with over 540,000 signatures to the President on June 16, 2005.

Also on June 16, 2005, Conyers assembled an unofficial meeting to receive evidence related to the Downing Street Memo and to consider grounds for impeachment. Dozens of Members of Congress attended. Witnesses included Ambassador Wilson, constitutional attorney John Bonifaz, and CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

In July, Conyers along with Representative Frank (see below) asked for research into the impeachability of Karl Rove with regard to the disclosure of CIA Operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

On December 20, the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, at Conyers' request, filed its 273-page report, The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War. The report included copies of house resolutions to to establish a bi-partisan Select Committee in the House - H.Res. 635; to censure the President - H.Res.636; and to censure the Vice President - H.Res. 637.

In comments on the report, Conyers said:

The report finds there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration.

The Report concludes that a number of these actions amount to prima facie evidence (evidence sufficiently strong to presume the allegations are true) that federal criminal laws have been violated. Legal violations span from false statements to Congress to whistleblower laws.

The Report also concludes that these charges clearly rise to the level of impeachable conduct. However, because the Administration has failed to respond to requests for information about these charges, it is not yet possible to conclude that an impeachment inquiry or articles of impeachment are warranted.

Conyers wrote a letter to President Bush advising him of his intent and invited citizens to join him in signing it .

Senator Boxer

On December 19, 2005 Senator Barbara Boxer(D-CA) issued a press release , saying that she had written four undisclosed legal scholars, asking if there were grounds for impeachment, citing the December 16, 2005 New York Times disclosure of Bush's authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor Americans without warrants and Nixon counsel John Dean's comments on December 18, 2005 that this constituted an impeachable offense.

Representative Lewis

An Associated Press report on December 20, 2005, said that Representative John Lewis told an interviewer at WAOK-AM News radio that the President should be impeached for authorizing the NSA's actions. A news release dated December 19, 2005 posted on John Lewis' official United States House of Representatives website says, "In my opinion, the President has violated the law, and the House and Senate must pursue their inquiries into this illegal program. The President must stop using the threat of terrorism and the tactics of fear to invade the privacy of American citizens. George W. Bush is the president. He is not a king. He is not above the law," and concludes, "There is no question that the U.S. Congress has impeached presidents for lesser offenses."

Senator Specter

On January 15, 2006, in an article "Specter says no 'blank check' for Bush on spying", Reuters reported that Republican Senate judiciary committee chairman Arlen Specter, who is launching an investigation of the warrantless spying program, mentioned impeachment and criminal prosecution as potential remedies if President Bush broke the law, although he downplayed the likelihood of such an outcome.

On February 5, 2006, Senator Specter said that he believed the Bush administration had indeed violated the law with its terrorist surveillance program and that its legal justifications for the program were "strained and unrealistic." He further said that the program "is in flat violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." However, Specter also raised doubts as to the constitutionality of the FISA statue saying "If a statute is inconsistent with the Constitution, the Constitution governs and the constitutional powers predominate." Committee hearings are scheduled to begin on February 6.

Representative Nadler

On January 21, the Detroit Free Press reported in a story, "Call is Out to Impeach Bush," that the previous day, at an unofficial hearing of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee called by Conyers, Scott and Van Hollen, Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), called for the committee to explore whether Bush should face impeachment for alleged high crimes and misdemeanors stemming from his decision to authorize domestic surveillance without court review. The proceedings had no legal authority, as committee chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, (R-WI), rejected Democrats'requests for an inquiry. Nadler is a senior Democrat on the committee's panel on the Constitution.

Public opinion

Polling results

Poll results show that many Americans support the hypothetical impeachment of Bush. These polls show greater support for the possibility of impeaching Bush than ever seen for the 1998 impeachment of Clinton, though the numbers are comparable to the early Clinton polls that used similar hypothetical wording as in the Bush polls.

In October of 2005, After Downing Street commissioned a poll by the independent Ipsos Public Affairs Research , which found that by a margin of 50% to 44% Americans say that President Bush should be impeached if he lied about the war in Iraq. 39% strongly agreed and 30% strongly disagreed with the statement, "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him." 72% of Democrats favored impeachment, compared to 56% of Independents and 20% of Republicans.

A Zogby International poll from October 29 to November 2, 2005 found that by a margin of 53% to 42% (+/-2.9%) Americans say that "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment." This was supported by 76% of Democrats, 50% of Independents, and 29% of Republicans. A November 2, 2005 Washington Post-ABC News poll found 55% of Americans believe the Bush administration "intentionally misled the public" in making its case for war.

December 15, 2005, Rasmussen Reports released a poll that showed that 32% of the 1,000 Americans polled would support an impeachment of Bush and 35% would support an impeachment of Cheney.

A Zogby poll released in January 2006 shows that a majority of Americans (52 percent to 43 percent) believe Congress should consider impeaching the president if it is shown that he wiretapped US citizens without approval from the courts.

Media response to polls

The major media have largely ignored these opinion polls and protests. Several columnists have endorsed impeachment. Eleanor Clift on the McLaughlin Group predicted on 6 November 2005 that "if the country, acccording to the polls, believes by a margin of 55 percent that President Bush misled us into war, the next logical step is impeachment and I think you’re going to hear that word come up and if the Democrats ever capture either house of Congress there are going to be serious proceedings against this administration."

When the Washington Post's chief pollster Richard Morin was asked by readers why the Post has not polled on impeachment he responded with "This question makes me angry". According to Media Matters, the Washington Post asked about impeachment in a poll conducted a few days after the revelation of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky in 1998. Frank Newport, the director of the Gallup Poll has said he would only run a poll on the subject if it starts to gain mainstream attention and not until then.

Public demonstrations

Rallies and marches

The rally held in Crawford, Texas by Cindy Sheehan and her supporters in late summer of 2005 featured frequent calls for impeachment.

A march in Washington, DC on 24 September 2005 attracted over 100,000 people. The march included calls for impeachment and for investigations leading to impeachment.

On November 2 2005, The World Can't Wait mobilized marches across the country that called for the ouster of Bush. News reports cited thousands of protesters in each of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and 500 in each of Washington, DC, Chicago, Atlanta and Seattle.

Rep. Maxine Waters founded the Out of Iraq Caucus in the House of Representatives. It has 66 members (as of August 31, 2005). An Out of Iraq event hosted by Rep. Waters in Inglewood, California, attracted 1200 supporters who loudly chanted "Impeach Bush" in response to a speaker explaining high crimes and misdemeanors.

Response to groups formed to support impeachment

Numerous groups have been created to support impeachment. The VoteToImpeach.org website claims to have collected half a million signatures on a petition to impeach Bush. None are known to have been created to oppose it (as MoveOn had been created to oppose the impeachment of Clinton).

See also PledgeBank's webpage on impeaching President Bush.

On December 20, 2005, The AfterDowningStreet.org website mounted an effort to support Representative Conyers' legislation to censure Bush and Cheney and to investigate the administration's lead-up to the Iraq war, in possible preparation to impeachment. Within the first three days, the site reported that over 17,000 people had used the site to write to their congressional representatives requesting that they support Conyers' measures.

Endorsements of impeachment

Politicians and government officials

John Conyers has advocated for the impeachment of Karl Rove and has been contacted by Americans desiring an impeachment of George W. Bush.
  • Ralph Nader's 2004 presidential campaign also promoted the cause of a Bush impeachment by raising public awareness of the numerous alleged crimes of the Bush Administration. Nader also wrote an op-ed, (along with Kevin Zeese, director of DemocracyRising.US) favoring impeachment in the May 31, 2005 Boston Globe.
  • Patrick Buchanan called for a bill of impeachment 'charging George W. Bush with a conscious refusal to uphold his oath and defend the states of the Union against "invasion"' in regards to issues with illegal immigration.
  • Dennis Morrisseau, a Republican candidate for the Vermont House of Representatives seat has said he will campaign for impeachment against George W. Bush.
  • Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration stated "The Bush administration is insane. If the American people do not decapitate it by demanding Bush’s impeachment, the Bush administration will bring about Armageddon."
  • Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury J. Bradford Delong has called for Bush's impeachment.
  • Former Vice-President Al Gore, in an ABC News story "Gore Says Bush Wiretapping Could Be Impeachable Offense" posted on the website January 16, 2006 stated impeachment may be warranted, pointed out that "...Article II of the impeachment charges against President Nixon was warrantless wiretapping, which the president said was 'necessary' for national security."

Legal experts and scholars

  • John Dean, former White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon and an early advocate of a Bush impeachment, believes that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to get the United States into a war with Iraq. Dean believes this is an impeachable crime. In a talk before Writers Bloc in Beverly Hills, CA on December 18, 2005, Dean "remarked that Bush is the first President to ever willingly admit to an impeachable offense." This led Boxer to write legal scholars asking for confirmation. See above section on Boxer.
  • Constitutional Law Professor Francis Boyle has written six draft articles of impeachment against Bush.
  • Constitutional Lawyer John Bonifaz has written a book on the case for impeaching Bush, is a co-founder of After Downing Street, and has spoken regularly in favor of impeachment.
  • Conservative scholars Bruce Fein (constitutional scholar and former deputy attorney general in the Reagan Administration) and Norm Ornstein (scholar at the American Enterprise Institute) argued on the December 19, 2005 Diane Rehm show that, should Bush remain defiant in defending his constitutionally-abusive wire-tapping of Americans (as he has indicated he will), Congress should consider impeaching him. Said Fein, "On its face, if President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a war-time President I can do anything I want – I don’t need to consult any other branches – that is an impeachable offense. It’s more dangerous than Clinton’s lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages. It would set a precedent that … would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant. " Said Ornstein, "I think if we’re going to be intellectually honest here, this really is the kind of thing that Alexander Hamilton was referring to when impeachment was discussed."
  • Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance, spoke about Bush's admission that he authorized warrantless wiretaps, in an interview for an article, “Bush’s Impeachable Offense” by Michelle Goldberg, published December 22, 2005 on Salon.com. "The president has already conceded that he personally ordered that crime and renewed that order at least 30 times. This would clearly satisfy the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors for the purpose of an impeachment." Turley testified against Clinton in that impeachment hearing and added "Many of my Republican friends joined in that hearing and insisted that this was a matter of defending the rule of law, and had nothing to do with political antagonism. I'm surprised that many of those same voices are silent. The crime in this case was a knowing and premeditated act. This operation violated not just the federal statute but the United States Constitution. For Republicans to suggest that this is not a legitimate question of federal crimes makes a mockery of their position during the Clinton period. For Republicans, this is the ultimate test of principle."

Authors

  • Robert Scheer, columnist and contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, has repeatedly called for impeachment.
  • In an October 27, 2005 column, "Hold Bush Accountable," Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, accused Bush of impeachable offenses and called on the American electorate to figuratively "impeach" Bush by voting against him.
  • A rundown of authors talking about impeachment was published in Editor and Publisher on December 21, 2005.

Organizations

  • The Green Party National Committee passed a resolution calling for impeachment of Bush and Cheney at its national meeting on July 21, 2003, citing a "pattern of making false statements to Congress, the American people, and the world to win support for actions by the American government and military forces", "quandering the resources of the American people to serve the interests of transnational corporations"; and war crimes, including the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs in the preemptive invasion of Iraq." This was the first known call for impeachment by a mass membership organization.
  • BuzzFlash.com a Chicago based news service, in a call for impeachment on April 4, 2004, editorialized that the administration had “deliberately ignored impending 9/11 hijacking attacks and led us into a disastrous war that has created more terrorism and united feuding religious sects in Iraq against us, that piles lies upon lies in an effort to prolong its stolen reign of power”
  • AfterDowningStreet, an organization begun by liberal activists Bob Fertik and David Swanson and constitutional attorney John Bonifaz, advocates a congressional Resolution of Inquiry into evidence related to what has become known as the Downing Street memo, involving the Bush administration's military operations in Iraq. Such a resolution would be the first step toward a possible impeachment.
  • Impeach Central is dedicated to the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for violating the laws of the United States. While the group says the Bush administration has violated the Constitution on numerous occasions, the group is focusing on what it sees as the lies they told the American people and Congress which led the country into the Iraq War.
  • On December 21, 2005, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote Attorney General Gonzales "requesting the appointment of outside special counsel for the investigation and prosecution of violations, or conspiracy to violate, criminal laws against warrantless wiretapping of american persons" .
  • On January 3, 2006, the Green Party of the United States repeated its call to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney as soon as possible, calling evidence that Bush has abused power "so overwhelming that failure to undertake impeachment would make Congress even more complicit in this administration's lawlessness."

Media Editorials and Opinion Pieces

  • Barron's, the conservative business journal published by the Wall Street Journal, editorialized in favor of impeachment on December 26, 2005, "Unwarranted Executive Power: The pursuit of terrorism does not authorize the president to make up new laws" or , "Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. ...The most important presidential responsibility...is that he must 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
The editorial further stated, "Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment."
It adds, "It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law."
  • The Capital Times, the progressive Madison Wisconsin newspaper founded in 1917, editorialized on December 30, 2005, in an editorial entitled "Talking About Impeachment" noted “The dwindling circle of right-wing defenders of the Bush-Cheney presidency would have Americans believe that only the most reckless partisans would even consider the prospect of censuring or perhaps even impeaching the president and vice president. But the prospect of officially sanctioning Bush and Cheney, as has now been proposed by U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is gaining ground in unexpected quarters."
"The evidence shows that serious wrongdoing has occurred. And those responsible need to be held to account not just by academics, former White House aides and national publications but by the citizens who can persuade members of Congress to become the watchdogs on executive wrongdoing that the founders intended." display editorial via first Forum item's Full Text link
  • The ultra-conservative John Birch Society magazine, The New American, published an opinion piece on January 9, 2006 in favor of impeachment, “It's Not Just a Piece of Paper”. Talking in the voice of Thomas Jefferson, were he alive today, it stated “'When in the course of U.S. events it becomes necessary for Americans to demand that their duly elected representatives impeach and remove from office a president, a decent respect to the opinions of their fellow citizens requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to such a course of action.’” The piece enumerates the reasons for impeachment, with links to news articles, and concludes, again in Jefferson’s voice, “’A president, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be a leader of a free people.’" Then resuming its own voice, the it states, states, “Mr. President, when you placed your hand over the Bible, raised your arm, and swore an oath before God to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" (Article II, Section I), that wasn't ‘just a book’ you put your hand on. And it certainly wasn't a mealy-mouthed ‘agreement’ you made before your Maker -- whose name you have no compunction about taking in vain. And Mr. President, the Constitution is not just a piece of paper.”

See also

External links

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