Barron’s Magazine Calls for Impeachment
Via MyDD: The business magazine Barron’s, which is owned by the same company that owns The Wall Street Journal, has become the first mainstream media outlet (that I’m aware of) to call for the impeachment of Bush.
This is big. When this country’s, uh, barons, are calling for impeachment, Bush has lost not just the left, but the rational right as well.
“AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers …Certainly, there was an emergency need after the Sept. 11 attacks to sweep up as much information as possible about the chances of another terrorist attack. But a 72-hour emergency or a 15-day emergency doesn’t last four years …
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 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…
Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”
Wrong. If we don’t discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy — in the mirror.
What's fab about the Baron's editorial is this: Rather than getting into a legal squabbling match about wether or not it's Constitutioal to spy (Bush, afterall, could win that P.R. war by sticking to his emotional "preventing another 9/11" rap), Baron's has distilled the arugment down to a much more basic point (see the 4th graph). They say: Even if it should be OK to "spy on al Qaeda" like Bush says, he didn't follow the rules laid out by Congress to allow him to do so.
In other words, it's not the blowjob that's illegal. It's messing with the rule of law.