Robert L. Borosage: Time for a Grand Inquest into Bush's High Crimes

[babylonsister]

Robert L. Borosage

Time for a Grand Inquest into Bush's High Crimes
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Posted June 24, 2008 | 06:45 PM (EST)


One of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's first acts upon taking the gavel was to rule impeachment off the table. She wanted Democrats to focus on challenging the president on the war and on kitchen table concerns -- from energy to education to health care. With Democrats now enjoying an increasing margin in generic polls and looking towards gaining seats in both the House and the Senate, the strategy certainly hasn't hurt politically.

But the constitutional implications are far more disturbing. This was dramatized as the Congress debated the FISA reform legislation that will provide retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies for warrantless interception of the conversations of Americans -- and by implication, retroactive acceptance of the president's authority to order such wiretaps.

We have witnessed a staggering abuse of power by this president. Even former Bush Justice Department officials now charge President Bush with trampling the Constitution. Bush has claimed the prerogative to declare an endless war without congressional approval, to designate someone an enemy without cause, to proceed to wiretap them without warrant, arrest or kidnap them at will, jail them without a hearing, hold them indefinitely, interrogate them intensively (read torture), bring them to trial outside the US court system. He claims that executive privilege exempts his aides -- even the aides of his aides and his vice president's aides -- from congressional investigation. He claims the right to amend or negate congressional laws with a statement upon signing them. And much more.

Even this Supreme Court, stacked with activist right-wing judges enamored of executive national security powers, has rebuked the president on some of these claims, particularly around the treatment of allegedly enemy combatants. But many of Bush's claims will escape judicial determination.

And there is the rub. According to the leading case on presidential powers, if Bush's extreme assertions of power are not challenged by the Congress, they end up not simply creating new law, they could end up rewriting the Constitution itself, altering the Constitutional division of powers by establishing the president's claims as constitutional powers that the Congress or the Courts may not infringe.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/time-for-a-grand-inquest_b_109021.html

[Hissyspit]

1. .

[pberq]

2. Constitutional implications

How about that, Madame Speaker?