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| 2006/3/16-18 [Politics/Domestic/California, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:42268 Activity:nil |
3/16 First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win. -M. Ghandi
http://csua.org/u/f9q (Article by http://Talkingpoints.com editor)
(NYT article on Bush impeachment)
\_ Why impeachment is a bad idea:
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/JoshMarshall/031606.html
http://tinyurl.com/oahfm (hillnews.com)
\_ Politics is local. The number of incumbents who lose elections each
term is trivial. Ghandi had a much better chance with the British
than the D do of retaking anything. His was a moral issue and he
was on the side of right against a people who think of themselves
in those terms. Ds and Rs are just politicians. There is no great
moral conflict. The math is the math. Don't hold your breath.
\_ The War on Iraq is not a moral conflict? Don't kid yourself.
\_ "Politics is local". Iraq is far far far away.
\_ In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 61 percent said the Iraq
war would be a very important or the most important issue
in deciding their vote for Congress.
\_ 'With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe,
conservatives would not stay at home after all."'
Uh, how does that jibe with 36% approval rating?
\_ A majority of Americans, 56 percent, believe Bush is "out of
touch," the poll found. When asked for a one-word description of
Bush, the most frequent response was "incompetent," followed by
"good," "idiot" and "liar." In February 2005, the most frequent
reply was "honest."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060316/pl_nm/bush_politics_dc |
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| csua.org/u/f9q -> www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/politics/16impeach.html?hp&ex=1142571600&en=c0fe339030f1f4ad&ei=5094&partner=homepage Search Call for Censure Is Rallying Cry to Bush's Base Jason Reed/Reuters A Democrat, Senator Russell D Feingold, right, sought to censure the president. Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican, countered over a video feed. DAVID D KIRKPATRICK Published: March 16, 2006 WASHINGTON, March 15 Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush. The proposal this week by Senator Russell D Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives' plans to harness such attacks to their own ends. With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr Feingold made his proposal. "Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now," Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter. The threat of impeachment, Mr Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party's demoralized base to go to the polls. With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all." For weeks, Republicans have taken to conservative Web sites and talk radio shows to inveigh against the possibility, however remote, that Democrats could impeach Mr Bush if they gained control of Congress. Mr Feingold's censure proposal fell far short of a demand for impeachment. Most Democrats in the Senate distanced themselves from it, concerned that they would be tagged by Republicans as soft on terrorism. But the censure proposal provided Republicans an opening. Rush Limbaugh told listeners on his syndicated radio program on Monday, saying the Democrats were fulfilling his predictions. "They have to go back to this impeachment thing," he said. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, a conservative standard-bearer, echoed the thought. "We'd like to congratulate the Wisconsin Democrat on his candor," its editors wrote Wednesday in a column headlined "The Impeachment Agenda." The Republican National Committee sent the editorial out to its e-mail list of 15 million supporters. Brian Jones, a Republican spokesman, said the e-mail messages generated a higher response than anything the party had sent in several months, including bulletins about the Supreme Court confirmations. "Clearly on our side it is something that is energizing our base a little bit," Mr Jones said. "In an interview on Wednesday, Mr Feingold declined to rule out supporting impeachment in the future, saying that the wiretapping "probably is the kind of thing the founding fathers thought of as high crimes and misdemeanors." But Mr Feingold also said he proposed the milder rebuke of censure instead of impeachment in part because of the context of the war and in part to avoid a political backlash from Mr Bush's supporters. "They can try to turn this into their fantasy, but that is not how this comes off," Mr Feingold said, noting that his proposal addressed only the narrow subject of the wiretapping program. "I didn't throw in Iraq or a lot of other things that frankly are pretty bad." Still, conservatives said they welcomed the debate over censure or impeachment. Some said they were especially pleased with the timing of Mr Feingold's proposal because it came just after the Democrats had upstaged the Republicans on national security during the outcry over an Arab company's takeover of several port terminals in the United States. "They finally found the issue where they could convince the American people that they, too, see an enemy," Mr Limbaugh said on his radio program. "In less than two days they are back to the NSA scandal as though we don't have a national security problem," he said, referring to the domestic eavesdropping program run by the National Security Agency. |
| www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/JoshMarshall/031606.html Impeachment is a shortcut for oversight Since talk of impeachment is in the air, it seems incumbent on all vocal critics of the president to go on the record with their points of view on this momentous question. So let me devote this column to explaining why I think it's a bad idea on both policy and political grounds. The power of the Congress to impeach the president is one of the most awesome powers in the Constitution. It's also one that the Constitution describes in the vaguest of manners. In the 1990s, congressional Republicans construed the language of "high crimes and misdemeanors" as a roving commission for the Congress to remove the president from office for any legal infraction, either in his personal or presidential capacity. But this was an abuse of the power of impeachment, not a proper use. Stringing up a president on a legal technicality over a deposition in a civil case wasn't what the Framers had in mind when they wrote the passage into our founding document. In our constitutional system, there must be some power to remove the president from office constitutionally and nonviolently because if the holder of the office simply refuses to accept or accede to the system of checks and balances outlined in the Constitution there's really very little the other branches can do to bring him to heel. At the extremes, the power of the purse just isn't a tight enough leash on a runaway president. The clearest case for impeachment is one in which the president refuses to follow the law and accede to the Congress's and the court's oversight powers. The only solution to such a constitutional crisis would be for the Congress to remove the president from office for violating his oath and committing political high crimes. But that's just not the case at the moment because Congress has made little if any effort to rein him in. So impeaching him can't make any sense because the Congress -- in the constitutionally indolent hands of the Republican majority -- has made no attempt to oversee the president by constitutional means. This isn't the only case where impeachment might be appropriate. Another would be the case where the president has simply lost the confidence of the country in either the legitimacy of his presidency or his ability to govern. This, I think -- for all its legal and constitutional particulars -- is the best explanation for the attempted impeachment of Richard Nixon. As you can probably see from what I've said above, I'm in the camp of those who believe that impeachment is inherently political. None of the constitutional scholars who speak of this or that crime "rising to the level" of high crimes and misdemeanors makes any sense to me. Crimes that would lead to impeachment can't be understood outside their particular political context. Or, to put it another way, the judicial crimes that a president might commit only become impeachable because they become political crimes. So that's my take on what impeachment is for and why the current situation doesn't call for it: Impeachment is for a president who won't allow Congress or the courts to exercise their constitutional powers. It's treated as a given by most Beltway Democrats that a push for impeachment is bad politics because it will take attention off the president's abysmal record and put it on the hot-button issue of impeachment and whether Democrats should be pursuing such a policy. I'm inclined to believe it's probably bad politics on those grounds too. But the key reason it's not smart politically is that it represents a grand evasion, a sort of political escapism on the part of Democrats who've had a very bad and dispiriting string of elections. Winning elections on the ground in swing states is hard. Making the case to the public that President Bush is a disastrous president who should be reined in is ... It may not be easy in the sense that it's going to happen any time soon or ever, but, conceptually, it's easy. But people who care about politics should care about it because they care about actual politics, what actually happens, who gets votes and who doesn't, who has the power for awesome decisions like going to war. Critics of the president who care about those things should do the one concrete and meaningful thing they can do at the moment to have an effect on those key issues, and that is to create a counterweight in the Congress, specifically by putting Democrats in control of at least one chamber. Once that happens, and if the Congress does its job of oversight, impeachment will still be there if the president continues his lawless ways. |
| tinyurl.com/oahfm -> www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/JoshMarshall/031606.html Impeachment is a shortcut for oversight Since talk of impeachment is in the air, it seems incumbent on all vocal critics of the president to go on the record with their points of view on this momentous question. So let me devote this column to explaining why I think it's a bad idea on both policy and political grounds. The power of the Congress to impeach the president is one of the most awesome powers in the Constitution. It's also one that the Constitution describes in the vaguest of manners. In the 1990s, congressional Republicans construed the language of "high crimes and misdemeanors" as a roving commission for the Congress to remove the president from office for any legal infraction, either in his personal or presidential capacity. But this was an abuse of the power of impeachment, not a proper use. Stringing up a president on a legal technicality over a deposition in a civil case wasn't what the Framers had in mind when they wrote the passage into our founding document. In our constitutional system, there must be some power to remove the president from office constitutionally and nonviolently because if the holder of the office simply refuses to accept or accede to the system of checks and balances outlined in the Constitution there's really very little the other branches can do to bring him to heel. At the extremes, the power of the purse just isn't a tight enough leash on a runaway president. The clearest case for impeachment is one in which the president refuses to follow the law and accede to the Congress's and the court's oversight powers. The only solution to such a constitutional crisis would be for the Congress to remove the president from office for violating his oath and committing political high crimes. But that's just not the case at the moment because Congress has made little if any effort to rein him in. So impeaching him can't make any sense because the Congress -- in the constitutionally indolent hands of the Republican majority -- has made no attempt to oversee the president by constitutional means. This isn't the only case where impeachment might be appropriate. Another would be the case where the president has simply lost the confidence of the country in either the legitimacy of his presidency or his ability to govern. This, I think -- for all its legal and constitutional particulars -- is the best explanation for the attempted impeachment of Richard Nixon. As you can probably see from what I've said above, I'm in the camp of those who believe that impeachment is inherently political. None of the constitutional scholars who speak of this or that crime "rising to the level" of high crimes and misdemeanors makes any sense to me. Crimes that would lead to impeachment can't be understood outside their particular political context. Or, to put it another way, the judicial crimes that a president might commit only become impeachable because they become political crimes. So that's my take on what impeachment is for and why the current situation doesn't call for it: Impeachment is for a president who won't allow Congress or the courts to exercise their constitutional powers. It's treated as a given by most Beltway Democrats that a push for impeachment is bad politics because it will take attention off the president's abysmal record and put it on the hot-button issue of impeachment and whether Democrats should be pursuing such a policy. I'm inclined to believe it's probably bad politics on those grounds too. But the key reason it's not smart politically is that it represents a grand evasion, a sort of political escapism on the part of Democrats who've had a very bad and dispiriting string of elections. Winning elections on the ground in swing states is hard. Making the case to the public that President Bush is a disastrous president who should be reined in is ... It may not be easy in the sense that it's going to happen any time soon or ever, but, conceptually, it's easy. But people who care about politics should care about it because they care about actual politics, what actually happens, who gets votes and who doesn't, who has the power for awesome decisions like going to war. Critics of the president who care about those things should do the one concrete and meaningful thing they can do at the moment to have an effect on those key issues, and that is to create a counterweight in the Congress, specifically by putting Democrats in control of at least one chamber. Once that happens, and if the Congress does its job of oversight, impeachment will still be there if the president continues his lawless ways. |
| news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060316/pl_nm/bush_politics_dc President George W Bush and helped drive his approval ratings to their lowest level ever, pollsters say. As Bush launched a series of speeches to drum up support for the war, a new round of opinion polls found growing skepticism about Iraq and distrust of Bush. His image declined sharply, with one poll finding "incompetent" to be the most frequent description of his leadership. Bush's approval rating dipped as low as 33 percent in one recent poll after a string of bad news for the White House, including uproars over a now-dead Arab port deal, a secret eavesdropping program, a series of ethics scandals involving high-profile Republicans and a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. The political storm has left Bush's second-term legislative agenda in tatters, threatened Republican control of the US Congress in November's elections and shredded his personal image as an effective leader. "His strong points as a president were being seen as personally credible, as a strong leader. That has all but disappeared," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, whose latest independent poll found a dramatic decline in Bush's credibility. A majority of Americans, 56 percent, believe Bush is "out of touch," the poll found. When asked for a one-word description of Bush, the most frequent response was "incompetent," followed by "good," "idiot" and "liar." "The transformation from being seen as honest to being seen as incompetent is an extraordinary indicator of how far he has fallen," Kohut said. Bush's slump is deep enough to put Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives at risk, pollsters said. Democrats must gain 15 House seats and six Senate seats to regain power in each chamber. "It's not the environment that we want to be running in," Republican pollster David Winston said. "Republicans can still hold the House and the Senate, but it's becoming increasingly more complicated." In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 61 percent said the Iraq war would be a very important or the most important issue in deciding their vote for Congress. As the third anniversary of the invasion approaches, they preferred Democrats over Republicans in handling Iraq by 48 to 40 percent. WAR 'A BIG ISSUE' "I think it is a big issue," House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said. "When the country is at war there is a certain unsettling that occurs with people around the country, as you might expect." Boehner said the anxiety over Iraq was coloring the public's view on other issues like the economy, which he said is performing well. "People don't look at the president's handling of the economy very well, and frankly I think it is a result of this anxiety over the fact that we are at war," he said. A recent CBS poll found 66 percent of the public believed the country was headed down the wrong track, while a Harris Interactive poll put the number at 60 percent. Views on Iraq and the war on terrorism were equally pessimistic, with 67 percent of respondents in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll saying Bush did not have a clear plan for handling Iraq. Independent pollster Dick Bennett of American Research Group said Bush's failure to acknowledge public anxieties added to his troubles. "The biggest problem the White House faces is reconnecting with people. "People can see for themselves that things actually are not fine." Bush's ratings are still above historical lows recorded since Gallup started presidential polling after World War Two. Miss Beazley, the dog owned by US President George W Bush, walks on the Colonnade of the West Wing near the Oval Office of the White House in Washington March 16, 2006. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. |
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