Presidents lying to lead us into War... it should be illegal

ISTM that you are arguing, not for standards when the President can be impeached, but when he must be impeached.

What is stopping Congress from impeaching Bush is not the vagueness of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard. It is that the political will is not there. They could impeach him tomorrow (actually, Monday) if they chose. But they are not going to.

Besides, I wonder if a clearer standard would help without the votes. Suppose we amend the Constitution to say “Congress shall impeach the President in any case where he lied to Congress in order to start a war”. A Congress that lacks the will to impeach can always say, “there isn’t enough evidence that he lied - after all, the report said his statements about Iraqi WMD were substantiated by the best intelligence estimates available.”

Regards,
Shodan

That others failed to catch the lie does not absolve the original liars. War is way too serious a subject to be turned into a game of Gotcha. But the Democrats are such a bunch of spineless worms I don’t believe they would have done anything different if they had read it.

If Congress has passed no law assigning penalties to whatever action you took, then… yes. The mere fact that you do something counter to a treaty the US has signed is not enough to prosecute you. Treaties, standing alone, don’t contain criminal penalties for individuals. Enabling legislation passed by Congress does.

It’s a basic tenet of law that you can’t prosecute someone for a crime that the law hasn’t defined.

Well… yeah. “Within the realm of his duties as President,” is key. We all understand that if Bush hauls out a baseball bat at a cabinet meeting and starts smacking Mike Leavitt in the head while discussing teamwork, he can be criminally prosecuted. But when the President exercises his Art II powers, he’s not really exposed to criminal liability. If he does something terrible, he can be removed. That’s it.

sigh

You know, I’m not even going to waste the time arguing this point. Good luck with this plan. I wish you every enlightenment that comes from your attempts to implement it.

President Bush: Enthusiasms, what are mine?

I’m surprised that you, as a lawyer and one who seems to have an abiding respect for the rule of law, are ok with the notion of someone being above the law. That you find such a state of affairs acceptable is amazing to me.

Clearly politics gets in the way of anything approaching justice. That congress saw fit to spend 7 years and $70 million dollars chasing Clinton for a $300,000 real estate deal and find nothing but a lie about a consensual blow job and impeach him is the system working to you? That Bush can violate constitutional protections, break treaties, start a war under dubious reasons and no one blinks is the system working to you?

Looks flat out busted to me.

That there are very real dangers imposing some liability to the president’s job I get and any attempt to try would have to be exceptionally careful. But being difficult does not mean the discussion should not be had.

Thinking on it some I think part of the problem is just leaving it to politicians who care more about polls than doing their job. So why not make something like a Grand Jury for this? If a congressperson reads in articles of impeachment (as Kucinich has already done) the matter goes before a Grand Jury…for this I would say the SCOTUS should act as the Grand Jury. They merely look to see if there seems to be enough there to merit a closer look…mostly like any grand jury (as I understand them). If they say yes then the House must proceed with due diligence as they ordinarily would for an impeachment. Note that I think congress cold skip the grand jury bit if they force impeachment proceedings as they would do today.

At least this could force the hand of congresscritters. An investigation would be conducted, testimony given and the public would be watching. True one party or the other may vote it down as a show of party solidarity but now it is on the record and hopefully they will have to answer for their decisions to the public.

I would also say IF a president is impeached AND convicted and thrown from office that he becomes criminally liable for the violations for which he was impeached for. Basically Congress saying the president abused his Art. II powers. Prosecution and penalties would proceed as any such case would.

Any problems with the above? Not perfect but still leaves it in the realm of elected officials and makes it a difficult hill to climb while serving notice to presidents they cannot do absolutely anything they please and expect to be wholly immune from any repercussions.

I’m surprised you don’t see the implications of making the president subject to prosecution - he could be paralyzed into inaction by another branch of the government. One that shouldn’t, I may add, have such direct power over him, according to the delicate system of checks and balances worked out by men who thought this problem through pretty extensively.

As it stands, the president isn’t above the law. But to be held accountable to it he must leave office, either through the expiration of his term or by impeachment. Impeachment itself carries a political check, both in its use and in refraining from using it. Republicans appear to have paid some price by impeaching Clinton some years back, and Republicans and Democrats alike might be paying a similar price by not impeaching Bush. Hard to tell on that one. I might also point out that Clinton settled his criminal charges after he left office in what amounted to a plea bargain - he paid some price for crimes he indeed committed.

You talk of politics getting in the way of justice - but how can you talk of the prosecution of the president and not talk of politics? Wouldn’t that in itself be a political action, just or unjust? Makes no sense to me.

You’re acting as if prosecuting someone were an inherently apolitical action, when numberless cases have shown this not to be necessarily so.

For drill, let’s say we implimented this, that if a random Senatory decided to read in articles for impeachment for a sitting President that it would automatically go to the SCOTUS for review (let’s leave aside how this might bog down the system and just focus on this aspect). Realistically, what do you think the SCOTUS would rule about the majority of the articles Kucinich has put forth? Do you think they would find there was sufficient justification to proceed with a formal impeachment or not? Would they have to go through ever one of Kucinich’s 30,000 (ok, just a slight exaggeration) pages of wrong doing on the Presidents part and parse them out? Would they be taken as a whole or weighed and measured individually? How long do you suppose something like that would take, realistically?

What would stop members of the opposing parties from reading in articles of impeachment every other week? Or would this only be for when a President uses military force?

ISTM that this would open the doors up to more Clintonesque impeachments…in fact, if I understand correctly, Clinton himself would STILL have been impeached, perhaps twice (Bosnia as well as the lying thingy). Not (necessarily) because of any merit but simply because the Republicans would have been happy to have someone read the articles of impeachment on the man and would have done so. Put such a system in place and I can practically guarantee you that Obama will have it used against him during his Presidency.

Like I said earlier, no one ever thinks the shoe will be on the other foot…or realize the amount of partisan politics happening at that level. Or hell, at THIS level. The Bush Lied™ meme is so entrenched that people lose touch with the fact that politicians always cherry pick data and present facts in such a way as to make their pet case look best, and that this applies to both Republicans as well as Democrats. And that this always looks worse when viewed from the opposite side of the issue or political party. ‘Truth’ in politics is in the eye of the beholder and is very much dependent on ones perspective on any given issue…the flip side being that what is one parties ‘truth’ is going to be the other parties motivation for reading in articles of impeachment, especially if we make special laws or procedures to make it easier to do so.

Unintended consequences would likely bite the OP and those who agree with him squarely on the butt somewhere down the road anyway…

-XT

I don’t understand. Is the fact that G.W. has not been impeached must mean that the “system” is somehow broke?

If Congress refuses to act on impeachment, then passing yet more laws, either on what is impeachable, or how to conduct the impeachment, won’t do diddly, it seems to me.

It’s not that Bricker thinks the President is above the law. The President is not above the law, and Bricker does not think he is. If the president violates the law he can be prosecuted…for violations of the law. Not for being a scumbag or a liar.

And just as clearly, officials are not criminally responsible for actions they took while discharging their duties. The city council that uses eminent domain to evict you from your house isn’t guilty of theft. The prison guard you keeps you in jail isn’t guilty of kidnapping. The captain who orders his platoon to take that hill isn’t guilty of murder even if it is certain that lots of men in that platoon aren’t coming back. And so on.

As for the contention that the system is broken because the Republican congress spent a lot of effort investigating Clinton, yet the Demorcatic congress isn’t doing the same thing against Bush, well, the argument I’d make is that the Clinton investigation was wrongheaded. We shouldn’t take the Clinton impeachment as the new standard for the future. And the system worked in the sense that while Clinton was embarrassed he won and the Republicans lost.

And what happens when your Grand Jury orders congress to impeach the President, and Congress ignores them? What penalty does congress face?

This is the trouble with all these schemes. We already have a system that can work to remove a rogue president, the only caveat is that it requires Congress to actually want to remove the rogue president. If Congress isn’t willing to impeach the president, then what? The voters select a congress that will. And if the voters aren’t willing to select a congress that will impeach the president? Well then it’s game over.

All this is driven by the public. If you want to impeach President Bush, rather than convincing a judge, you’ve got to convince the voters. If the voters were clamoring for Bush’s blood, you can bet your boots that Congress would be holding impeachment hearings today. Except while the voters are tired of Bush, and have a pretty low opinion of Bush, very few voters have the stomach for impeachment, and besides, we’re going to have a new president in 6 months. If you think they SHOULD that’s fine, but the remedy there isn’t demanding new laws that you can prosecute George Bush, but rather to convince the rest of us that Bush must be impeached. If you can’t convince us that Bush must be impeached, you’re surely not going to convince us to change the law to make it easier to prosecute the President, right?

You’ve got the cart before the horse. You’re not going to get new laws to go after George Bush if you can’t convince everyone that George Bush must be gone after.

The fact is, impeachment is a political act, not a judicial act. It is congress’s responsiblity to expell disgraced members of congress (such as Trafficant), just being sent to jail doesn’t automatically expell you from Congress. It is congress’s responsibility to impeach the president or vice president or other officials. They can’t delegate that responsibilty. They can’t wish they didn’t have it. Delegating that responsibility to unelected officials is undemocratic, and erodes accountability. That was the whole point of giving the power of impeachment to congress…congress is directly accountable to the voters. They can pursue an unjust vendetta against a President (see the Clinton impeachment debacle), but they’re going to have to pay a price.

The ultimate protection for our liberal democracy is not a particular set of laws, or a particular constitution. It is the determination of the citizenry that we should have a liberal democracy. If the citizenry doesn’t want a liberal democracy then the constitution is irrelevant.

Yep. It was Democrats who pushed the independent counsel law through in the late 1970s. Many of them became vehement critics of it during the Whitewater investigation.

And even if one doesn’t accept that claim, one can also point out that Clinton resisted this investigation, thereby drawing it out.

Either way, the point remains… the system ain’t broke.

Not quite done there, Moto. You need to specify Dems who were wholly in favor of the independent counsel law and then changed their minds when it was applied to a Democrat. Then you need to show that their criticism was of the law itself, and not to an unjust application of the law.

If you support the death penalty as a general rule, but vehemently criticize its application for jay-walking, that is not indicative of hypocrisy.

I do not see my proposal above as paralyzing a president. Police are protected from prosecution when performing their duties but it is not an absolute bar to prosecution. If they go too far they can get busted yet this does not paralyze them.

You still need to do the whole impeachment song and dance. If that succeeds he is only open to prosecution on his Art II powers that he was impeached for (if any). Even then, if it was a political hit job, he may well be found innocent or not even deemed worthy of prosecuting.

I do not see that in anyway scaring a president to inaction.

As was established above the president apparently is as long as whatever it was he did is deemed to fall under his Art. II powers. The worst you can do is remove him from office no matter how heinous his actions are.

Yes it will be politics to a large extent. Largely I have left the process untouched. I added another means to see an impeachment go forward which seems like a check-and-balance to me. And I added a way for a president to potentially be held accountable for abusing his Art II powers. Political bullshit can still get in the way to be sure but it allows a tad more latitude in holding those in power accountable since today no such mechanism exists (beyond impeachment).

I’ll repost what I wrote above:

Congress saw fit to spend 7 years and $70 million dollars chasing Clinton for a $300,000 real estate deal and find nothing but a lie about a consensual blow job and impeach him is the system working to you? Bush can violate constitutional protections, break treaties, start a war under dubious reasons and no one blinks is the system working to you?

Seems more than a little backwards to me. YMMV

Those are the faults of the actual Congresscritters involved, and how they are using the system. It’s not the system itself that is broke…

Are you looking from some remedy that will somehow force Congress to act, when it appears it does not want to? Such a remedy would lead to a political log jam, I think.

I don’t have to go about business quite as you say. And I’m not accusing anyone of hypocrisy - I don’t think anyone understood in 1978 exactly how independent prosecutors would work in practice.

The statute authorizing them expired in 1999. It does not seem that either party did much heavy lifting to reauthorize the statute - Republicans had never liked it, and Democrats by then were in the immediate aftermath of the impeachment. It is unlikely that Clinton would have reauthorized the law unless considerable changes were made to it - in any case authority for these prosecutions reverted to the Justice Department.

I did find this cite which indicates that what I said about Democrats was true:

Hope that helps you.

And it should be pointed out, BTW, that that was a “reform” that led to its own set of huge problems - something we all should remember as we think about the OP.

To repeat a question, would this be automatic, or would there need to be a vote in the House?

So, if McCain were elected, and Democrats wanted to keep him busy, they just read an article of impeachment in the Senate every Monday morning. SCOTUS would need to be continually in session, I guess.

Or is there more to the process than that?

Regards,
Shodan

I’m sure such things could be addressed that would detail this to everyone’s satisfaction.

Further, there is no stipulation that the SCOTUS go to amazing lengths. Presumably they would treat it with some seriousness but if they want to sit on the crapper and read it and then wipe their ass with it that’s their own lookout. If Congress sends them a new one daily they probably would do that.

And why do you think Congress would read new articles of impeachment daily? Such a thing would be clearly meant as disruptive. A congressman who did such a thing would be reviled by his fellow critters, likely would be shunned in his other dealings as a politician, would fail his constituents, would be slammed in the media and maybe even censured or worse by Congress. I think there are plenty of reasons for them to not want to play such silly games and would not bother. Besides, it is hard to imagine any President handing real issues that would be deemed impeachable on a daily (or weekly or monthly) basis. Once the few that did (possibly) merit a closer look were done what is left? Farting in a cabinet meeting? Can you possibly think any congresscritter would face the public with that? I presume they could not keep handing the same issue in over and over just to be told “no” daily.

YES. You don’t judge the success of a system based on whether someone was found guilty or not. You don’t base your investigation (of the Whitewater dealings, for example) based on the party’s guilt or innocence. Rather, this person’s guilt (or degree thereof) is determined in the course of this investigation.

And I repeat: One huge reason why the Lewinsky investigation cost so much was because of Bill Clinton’s resistance. He dragged it all out instead of coming clean. Now, we could argue all day long about whether his behavior was appropriate or not, but the point remains… Clinton himself contributed heavily to the mess by attempting to invade the investigation, thus prolonging the whole sordid affair.