If you say so.
I find that picture disturbing, especially from a party that gave us Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson.
I’m a conservative. But I don’t find a completely comfortable home with the GOP. I despise the death penalty, for instance, and I would love to find a strong, forceful Democrat that I could count on to carry that stance forward. I don’t want to accept that the Democrats are eschewing strong stances on everything.
Just to nitpick, the court or jurisdiction would be, hypothetically, the ICC, and not the ICJ, which mediates disputes between states. (The US doesn’t recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC over the US, so it would have to first do that for Bush to be on trial for any crimes to be committed under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.)
As for the question, “is there a penalty”, then the answer is that, for violating the Geneva Convention, it’s possible. Article 8, section 2(a) of the Statute provides:
If that’s what BrainGlutton is accusing Bush of violating, the penalty can be found under Article 27, to wit:
In the sense that so many of the calls for impeachment include a call to impeach Cheney, and never occurred until a Democrat became Speaker of the House. And in light of the fact that the Democrats have been unable to win an election against Bush. They lost in 2000, and tried the same kind of thing - politicize the legal process and try to get into the White House that way. Then again in 2004, all the accusations of vote fraud that keep getting dragged up. More of the same.
Same thing here. The instant they take over the Congress, they want to impeach those they cannot legitimately defeat. They might as well try, it seems, since they can achieve nothing else.
Regards,
Shodan
Looks like Hillary, at the moment. Astonishingly enough.
I’ll add here that I completely agree with Bricker that the possibility of impeachment is nonexistent, though possibly for different reasons. The stone wall around the White House is holding extremely - even unprecedentedly - well. Even if I assume that Bush has committed impeachable offenses, at this point there is no way to demonstrate those in such a verifiable way as were Nixon’s offenses.
Even given the impeachment and conviction of Bush, a simulpeachment and conviction of Cheney is so far out that I can’t even picture it, even if the pipe I saved from the old days still has some resin in it.
All we can do is grit our teeth, wait another year and a half, and hope that the new Democratic president reverses rather than grabs onto the unitary executive.
Did you type that with a straight face?
There have been calls for impeachment coming from prominent congressional Democrats since before Pelosi became speaker…just off the top of my head I can name Conyers, McKinney, and Feingold (not to mention calls coming from outside Congress). So on that point, you’re simply wrong.
That there is more support for impeachment now (your only evidence of it being a power grab) could equally be because Bush and Cheney have done more impeachable things. So, the only evidence you offer for your point is entirely ambiguous. Which is fine, reasonable people can disagree on the Democrats’ motives for impeachment based on that evidence…
…but wait, you don’t think reasonable people can disagree. In fact, you think people that disagree with you are fanatically stupid. Hard to find much more transparent partisanship than that.
Would you care to respond in some substantive way?
Regards,
Shodan
I have to ask, since no one else seems to want to…
What scandal? The attorneys work at his pleasure. Clinton fired every bloody one when he took office and nobody said a word about it.
Not all of them, of course.
Regards,
Shodan
I appreciate the retraction.
One does, of course, remember the 1990’s. Doesn’t one?
One suspects that allusion is lost on one.
Was he firing them because they prosecuted Democrats ? Did he fired them because they refused to hound Republicans without evidence ? Was it part of a larger pattern where he systematically replaced everyone possible with loyal Clintonites, regardless of competence, ethics or the cost to others ? If not, then it’s not the same.
Is there a reason you’re dusting off six-month-old talking points that have been debunked a million times already?
Yes, Clinton did fire every bloody one. At the beginning of his term. Just like every president since the inception of the position of US Attorney has. Sweeping the old president’s USAs out is an accepted and traditional act.
What ISN’T accepted nor traditional is to fire a specific group of US Attorneys in the middle of a president’s term with no wrong-doing on their part, almost certainly because they were actually being impartial prosecutors and delving into Republican corruption a little too deeply for the comfort of the White House. No president has done that, ever.
Do you have an actual argument to make or are you going to continue reciting ancient Freeper bullpucky in the hopes that we won’t notice that you’re covered with it?
The scandal here is the purpose behind the firings: To draft the DoJ into a partisan-electoral instrument that would seek to tilt elections and perpetuate a Pub majority by suppressing Dem votes and selectively prosecuting Dem officials.
But, you knew that.
Well, perhaps the SDMB wants to deny it, but even the MSM admits the possibility of a political motive behind Conyers. And of course McKinney’s various lunacies are well documented. So at least two of those you mention are, indeed, fanatically stupid. Feingold, of course, is on record against impeachment, as is Pelosi. So, as I mentioned, the push for impeachment seems to be coming mostly from the fringe, in Congress and out.
In other words, IOKIADDI.
Regards,
Shodan
The American people expect that the DOJ’s prosecution decisions will be made solely on the evidence available in the the case and the likelihood of obtaining convictions.
The facts show that recent prosecution decisions were influenced by party affiliation. The influence was exerted by the White House firing the prosecutors who:
That is crossing a clear and bright line which you do not cross. It is not difficult to understand. There is nothing to show it was ever done by, or OK if a Democrat did it.
Bush swore an oath to faithfully execute the laws. If it can be proven that he selectively fired attorneys as part of an overall scheme to rig the Justice Department to skew against prosecuting Republicans and go vigorously after Democrats (the numbers are very very fishy on this), then I consider that a direct violation of his oath of office. And if his Oath means anything, it means that he can be removed from office for violating it.
Which is, of course, exactly why there was such an outcry when Bush did it way back at the beginning of his term, when the Democrats in Congress called for an investigation and…wait, no. That didn’t happen.
Hmm…I wonder why. What could the difference between those firings and the ones currently being investigated be?
This post is entirely unresponsive to the point, which is that Dems supported impeachment before Pelosi was in power.
Also, Feingold supported impeachment at the time, or at least talked about the possibility. It is only after Pelosi came into power that he has closed that door. More proof that your theory is wrong.
If he fired every single US Attorney, then I think we can safely conclude that competence and ethics were not his motivating factors. Are we to assume that of all the US Attorneys brought on under the previous administration, NOT ONE was competent or ethical enough to meet Clinton’s standards?
What factors do you believe motivated Clinton’s actions, if not politics?