Willful ignorance is not a virtue. It is easy to query the exact wording of the articles of impeachment levied against Clinton. He was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice and nowhere does it say that the Congress of the United States is impeaching him for the offense of receiving a blow job. You can bend it anyway you like but that’s the facts.
Cite?
Why would he have paid the fine, and surrendered his law license, if he never broke a law?
The perjury charge was certainly being pursued by prosecutor Robert Ray, and was settled in just this fashion.
As others have pointed out, a President can be impeached at the whims of Congress - thus there is no “non-impeachable” condition because Congress may impeach for any reason they want. So “impeachable” means nothing because everything is impeachable.
“Now that God is dead, is everything permitted?” It’s that sort of existensial lack of meaning you suggest? Well that’s a relief because it looked like Martin Hyde was on about something altogether more prosaic.
I can think of a number of reasons, the same reasons you may pay a $20 speeding ticket instead of fighting it in court. Namely, you want it to go away, you plead no contest and have it off of your record for what amounts to probation, fighting it any further would be a waste of time, etc. If Clinton wasn’t convicted of perjury, under our system, we don’t get to say he is a perjurer. He may be a perjurer, just like OJ is a murderer, but legally he ain’t squat.
Perhaps, but you don’t get to claim that charges weren’t being pursued against him when they clearly were.
It is true with regard to “high crimes and misdemeanors” and the impeachment of the President, which is the scope of the law the OP was talking about. I was not talking about all laws in general.
I don’t get it. I thought this thread was about whether or not Dubya would be impeached. Somehow Clinton gets dragged into it. Is there some sort of obsession at work here?
No they weren’t. Articles of impeachment are not criminal charges. Clinton was never charged with a crime.
I would say more like “unfinished business.” The Pubbies crossed the line wrt the blowjob impeachment. Subconsciously they and their defenders know it, which is why they keep trying to transform the substance of it into a perjury trap debate. I and others do not think they should be allowed to get away with this, for reasons I’ve already explained. So every time the topic comes up, and one side or the other pipes up, the other side feels compelled to respond.
Yes, it’s important to be clear about the reasons for the Clinton impeachment. You may disagree, but it seems obvious to me that it was not about either the sex or about lying about sex. It was a simple, pure, act of spite. There had been a partisan campaign starting well before Clinton’s nomination to find something to get him for, arguably all in the spirit of simple political hardball, and it took years to find something that could be spun into a defense of the law and morality. The blowjob was just the pretext - if there had been anything at all substantive in the earlier areas of Starr’s investigation, it would have been that. If there had been no blowjob, Starr would have kept going, with his unlimited taxpayer funding and unlimited authority (yes, really, in reality) until he found something else. But there was never really a doubt that the Republican leadership was going to impeach him as soon as they could come up with a way to rationalize their simple personal spitefulness.
The Andrew Johnson impeachment, since a discussion is demanded, actually did start with a serious basis - policy disagreements over nothing less than keeping the Civil War won. Personal spite did creep into it eventually, as the article charging him with making defamatory statements about Congress shows, but fundamentally the impeachment was about Reconstruction policy, not defamation or even his violation of the unconstitutional Tenure of Office Act that the Reconstruction dispute created. It should never have come to that point, certainly, but its causes were pretty damned important to the nation. You can’t say that about the Clinton impeachment with a straight face.
Yes, both cases have to be considered if you’re judging the appropriateness of a Bush/Cheney impeachment - would it be fundamentally an act of spite, or about lying us into a war of aggression, regardless of the specific acts charged in the Articles?
I suppose this is true if the goal is to keep alive a tit-for-tat chain of turmoil in the national politics.
In order to stop that, though, it seems to me that each impeachment must be considered on its own merits and “high crimes and misdemeanors” be given what I think was the intended meaning, acts that jeopardize the general welfare or common defense.
David, no, it isn’t about tit for tat, it’s about statesmanship. If you’re going to judge each case on its own merits, you have to have standards for making those judgments, and given Congress’ carte blanche under the Constitution only precedents can provide those standards. Johnson’s and Clinton’s are the only two we have.
Do you claim that a Bush/Cheney impeachment really would be fundamentally about avenging Clinton’s, as your “tit-for-tat” dismissal suggests? Certainly the loyalist media would claim so. Do you claim that there wouldn’t be any other underlying causes worth discussing? Or only that there should *never * be an impeachment over fundamental matters of state, only to remove corrupt judges and the like? *That * I might agree with.
I don’t know. You’ll have to ask **Diogenes **about that, since he’s the one who introduced the subject to this thead.
Clinton lied under oath.
However, **he did not commit perjury. **How could that be?
Because the judge (rightly) decided the testimony was not relevant to the case. Perjury has to be pertinent, intentionally misleading info.
Ken Starr fed info (I believe, but I’m not quite sure, unethically to the point where he should be disbarred) to the Paula Jones team.
Just as it strains credulity that Clinton was being truthful, it also strains credulity to think the Monica questions were not asked of him to get him to lie.
I guess the OP’s already been answered. Because it’s a Republican congress, even though Bush’ approval rating is 30-odd percent, and even though he has lied to the public in order to further an agenda counter to the country’s best interests, and has broken the law with wiretapping (and I believe he knows he broke the law because he asked for the law to be changed), the question of impeachment will never even be allowed on the floor of the house because the Republicans are in charge.
Clinton wasn’t impeached because of a BJ, nor was he impeached because of perjury, he was impeached because he was Clinton. Perjury was the pretext, the BJ was the driving force behind the lies, but the partisan hatred of Clinton is what made the impeachement happen.
“Because of” suggests to me that the BJ (or the perjury) was the reason lawmakers voted to impeach. I’m way to jaded to think that congressmen actually give a crap, or are genuinely upset to find out a guy got a hummer from an intern. It was an opening, a chance to really stick it good to Clinton, all because they wanted Clinton disgraced, by any means at their disposal.
My standard would be actions contrary to law resulting in egregious harm to the interests of the US.
No I don’t claim that. I don’t think we need to even mention Clinton. It seems to me that GW’s actions are questionable enough under the law to at least call for a thorough hearing on whether or not the self-serving legal opinions by those accountable only to him have any validity.
I believe moving our detention facility to Guantanamo Bay violates our rules regarding access to representation. The claim that the prisoners there were taken on the battlefield and therefore are a special category who are not covered by any of the Constitutional guarantees remains largely unexamined by anyone outside the executive department.
The claim that the Congressional authorization for armed action against Iraq sets aside the requirement for warrants before listening to US citizens telephone conversations remains unexamined. We have only more self-serving legal opinions by those whose positions of high prestige and authority depend upon the president’s pleasure. Contrary voices have no legal standing to force a hearing on the matter and can only write opinion pieces which are easy to ignore.
The continued hair-splitting legal opinions as to where is the line between prohibited torture and aggressive interrogation seems to me to certainly be damaging the US internationally and lowering to unacceptable levels the standards of what we should expect of ourselves.
These and other things are the basis for a full examination of GW’s actions by an outside agency and since it appears they are not going to be examined by a court, maybe the trial of an impeachment is the only way.
Unfortunately although the Senate is an outside party, it isn’t exactly a disinterested outside party but it might be all that is available.
In any case, I won’t happen with the House and Senate’s present composition and as others have said, there isn’t time enough after next year’s election and the composition of the Senate is unlikely to reverse the majority.
However I do think that a thorough airing and definition of Presidential powers in wartime is called for somewhere along the line. By individual executive actions in emergencies which “seemed like a good idea at the time” we have erected a conglomeration of executive powers that seem to me to be outside anything contemplated in the Constitution.
John Mace - regarding your asking for a cite that Clinton’s impeachment was because he was Clinton, Henry Hyde hinted that it was when he stepped down:
http://www.bluebus.org/archives/20050421_henry_hyde_clin.php
That’s not exactly what I was asking about, but even if it were, that’s a pretty weak “hint” (emphasis added):
Having said that, I think it’s a reasonable position to take that the Republicans were out to get Clinton, and were looking for a way to impeach him. That is pretty much my own position on the matter. But to claim that they “trapped” him is a stretch. Had he not lied under oath, he wouldn’t have been impeached “for a blowjob” as some here insist on claiming. I find it the height of disingenuosness to claim that one’s own opinion is a fact and yet to ignore the actual articles of impeachment that were voted on. We can’t know the motivation of lawmakers, but we can read the articles of impeachment.