Whether a prospective war with Iran is the fuque-up du jour or not misses the point a bit. These are people with a proven record of shitwititude. They are dangerous to the Republic (yes! even more of a threat than the pandemic of Cognitive Dissonance!) and need to be gelded, for their sake as well as ours.
The threat of impeachment is probably more useful than the thing itself, rather like nuclear weapons you’d much prefer not to use. I remain entirely open to any suggestion that accomplishes the desired end of reining in. So I still say “Bring!”, but more respectfully, albeit with a dwindling and frustrated patience.
As I said earlier, there’s no way to oppose whatever half-baked ideas The Leader comes out with, because the founding fathers never thought to give us a legislature independent from the executive.
We’re fucking doomed. Bush can do anything he likes, and no one on Earth can stop him. If only some political party could be formed that somehow…I don’t know…opposed his policies. It’s a fucking fantasy though…how could such a party form in the current climate of fear? And with Bush’s approval ratings at their current level it’s clear that the American People will blindly support anything and everything he wants.
No. I’m just really afraid of the consequences of a war with Iran.
BTW, here in GD, we debate issues, not fellow posters. There’s a forum for that. Feel free to psychoanalyze me in the Pit, if you must.
I refer you back to the OP:
Yes, you did say this earlier, @87. I responded, you replied, I rebutted your reply, etcetera.
Now you’re just saying the same shit over again a second time. Should we take it as read that the sequence of responses will be the same, rather than actually having to post them one by one? Good.
I will have to ask what Shodan was essentially asking for: a cite for any of this.
I’m just flipping through the Federalist Papers, and I just don’t see any hint of, “the real reason for impeachment is so lawbreaking Presidents won’t continue to do it.” By my reading, it’s the act of violating a public trust that brings forth the consequence of impeachment and conviction; it’s not the fear that a President might do something else in the future. For example:
“Proceed from the misconduct” of officials, and relate to “injuries done immediately” to our society. That seems pretty clear to me that Mr. Hamilton didn’t foresee preemptive impeachment for something that someone may or may not do in the future.
I’m also leafing through the resolution of impeachment for Nixon. Link I see a list there of what Nixon did and why he betrayed the Constitution. I don’t see anything listing a fear that he might keep breaking laws if allowed to continue in office.
If you have any arguments besides your bare assertions what the Founders thought impeachment should be about, please provide them. If the facts are on your side, I’ll reconsider my position. But you’re not building much of a case by simply stating your view and telling others to reread your opinions.
Oh, all right. The Senate’s own site has a pretty good historical summary. Remember that what the Constitutional Convention wrote is what they agreed should be done. What they agreed the impeachment procedure and reasons should be is illustrated, entirely, by what they wrote into the Constitution. Hokay? The debates that went into it are of historical interest only.
Now, note that the Constitution explicitly *separates * the impeachment/removal process from the legal system, confining its “judgment” (*not * “punishment”) to removal and disqualification. If the goal *were * to punish the miscreant, do you think would that be the case?
Consider criminal convictions, since you seem determined to draw the comparison. Sentencing isn’t only about punishment, ya know. Punishment can take a wide variety of forms. But putting a violent criminal in jail is largely about *protecting society * from someone with a proven predilection to commit violent crimes. Now draw the analogy, and remember to keep separate your thoughts about punishment of the subject and protection of the nation.
So you don’t have a cite that establishes what you claim.
You claimed this -
Now you are claiming that it is explicitly in the Constitution. Please cite where.
I need to see the clause where the Constitution says outright that the purpose of impeachment is to prevent future misdeeds. While you are at it, you could also cite the part where it says that it is OK to punish someone for something they haven’t done, on the off chance that they might do it in the future.
Good! Then your speculations about what it should be about are entirely worthless. Only what was written into the Constitution counts. I agree.
Find out about what? I don’t see anything from the text of the Constitution there.
I also don’t see anything about posters who have been caught talking nonsense and refuse to admit it. For that, we have this thread.
Oh, and :rolleyes: And
Of course, I have this to bring up the next time you start up about gay marriage and abortion -
To me, good faith means producing quotations that bolster one’s point. Simply posting links to tons of articles, or one article on the same subject but having nothing to do with the subject at hand, is really an ineffective, lazy, and somewhat insulting way to try to prove a point. It is like if I say that science has proven that God is real, and you challenge me on it, I can’t “prove” my point by telling you how to get to the Library of Congress.
I’d take your arguments more seriously if they were not postulated from ignorance, that is, “If X is so, then wouldn’t Y make more sense?” You’re excluding the possibility that there are other reasons for X. Well, turns out that Mr. Hamilton also addressed the reason why the trial of impeachment is separate from criminal trials. It, too, is in Federalist 65:
That quote seems to bear more on issues of which body or bodies should be charged with conducting impeachment proceedings. I’m not at all sure Mr. Hamilton’s remarks in this regard have any direct relevence.
Be that as it may, while Hamilton is certainly a contributor to the collective effort of the Constitution, he is not the author, and his opinions were not universally accepted.
And the excerpt suffers for lack of context… for instance “…Would there not be the greatest reason to apprehend, that error, in the first sentence, would be the parent of error in the second sentence?..”. What error is he talking about?
By bringing forward that quote, I’m not trying to prove the point that preemptive impeachment is permissible, I’m merely trying to refuse Elvis’ assertion that impeachment is about protection of the country, apparently to the exclusion of the concept of punishing of a wrongdoer.
The first sentence-second sentence thing: by my reading, the context is the line directly preceding it. (He’s using the term “sentence” as in “verdict,” if that helps.) it is saying that if the Senate were to mistakenly drag a good person’s name through the mud by expelling them from high office, it wouldn’t make sense to allow the Senate to also have the power to send that person to jail. In other words, a short-sighted effort to punish a political opponent shouldn’t be able to deprive the political opponent of his liberties, too.
Look, if you or anyone else say his opinions are not universally accepted, and that the Framers of the Constitution intended preemptive impeachment, then at least you should be able to produce a historical argument to refute what I’ve found in about five minutes of Googling. What I’ve found indicates that there does not appear to have been any consideration whatsoever to impeachment based on no evidence of wrongdoing.
I agree with your doing this. I certainly don’t see any evidence that the Founders intended impeachment for protection of the country, beyond the trivial sense that removing anyone from office for commission of past actions protects us from their repeating those actions in the future.
I’m strictly going with a “the Founders could not have foreseen” sort of argument here: they didn’t live in a world where the President could say, “I’ve already bombed Iran back into the Stone Age, now what are you going to do about it?”
I think they did foresee it, which is why they provided for impeachment. How is “waging war on Iran” any different from bombing Libya (or bombing Iraq, except in 1998)?
If the President commits something that can plausibly be presented as “high crimes and misdemeanors”, then the House impeaches and the Senate convicts and removes from office. But none of this stuff about “we can’t wait until he actually commits the high crime or misdemeanor, it’s too urgent”. Any President can be impeached if that is grounds enough.
What you are arguing is that any time Congress is controlled by one party and the White House by the other, Congress can/should impeach. You haven’t explicitly said “sauce for the goose”, but I suspect there is some of that behind it. Hell, you can’t even come up with any plausible evidence that Bush did anything illegal. At least when Clinton was impeached, we had a blue cocktail dress and a statement under oath. You can’t even point to an instance of Bush attacking a country without Congressional approval.
Fine with me, as previously mentioned - I encourage the Dems very strongly indeed to be as public as possible about their efforts to impeach Bush. It would have been more honest if you had simply announced it before the elections, and thus given the voters a chance to weigh in more directly, but I suspect you know as well as I that this is political suicide, because the motives are so obvious.
:shrugs:
“We can’t afford to wait for the political process to work” has been the cry of a certain element in the US for years. I still have enough faith in America to believe that the voters will see what you want to be up to more clearly than you like.
Maybe if it doesn’t work out for you, you can hire some Dutchman to set fire to the Reichstag.
Not to its exclusion, no - but the primary purpose, from reading the Constitution itself and trying to understand its purpose, does tend to lead one to that conclusion.
Your Hamilton quote, to the extent it’s relevant, asserts that an officeholder who’s already been removed should not face criminal justice for it. Well, friend, the *Constitution * says exactly the opposite, sorry. Hamilton’s argument lost.
And they obviously weren’t. Not even by the Constitutional Convention.
I can find the Constitution in about five *seconds * of Googling.
Do you actually have an argument that is *either * historically relevant or addresses what I’ve already presented you with? Speaking of good faith, that is. :dubious:
“Trivial”? What’s trivial about that? One might have thought the basic need society has for protection was so obvious that it didn’t need esoteric debate at all. One was apparently wrong about that.
The element that demanded Clinton’s impeachment, you mean? Recanting now that the party names are reversed, are you?
Read the quote over again. Hamilton isn’t arguing that public officials should be above the law, far from it. He’s just arguing that impeachment should only remove an official from office, and NO MORE. Criminal or civil liability is an entirely seperate issue to be decided by an entirely seperate body, namely the courts.
Hamilton’s argument won, that’s what’s in the constitution.
