Put Impeachment Back On The Table, Madam Speaker

If you were not watching Bill Moyer's Journal Friday night, please try to catch in on re-runs or at the above linked site. Here is the transcript PBS provided of the show.

Bill Moyers had on former Reagan Administration Associate Deputy Attorney General now constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who wrote the First Article of Impeachment against President Bill Clinton, and The Nation's John Nichols, author of The Genius Of Impeachment.

Both Fein and Nichols agree that impeachment proceedings need to be initiated now against President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

John Nichols said this:

“The Scooter Libby affair gets to the heart of what, I think, an awful lot of Americans are concerned about with this administration and with the executive branch in general: that it is lawless. That it can re-write the rules for itself. That it can protect itself. And you know the founders anticipated just such a moment. If you look at the discussion in the Federalist Papers, but also in the Constitutional Convention, when they spoke about impeachment one of the things that Madison and George Mason spoke about was the notion that you needed the power to impeach particularly as regards pardons and commutations. Because a president might try to take the burden of the law off members of his administration to prevent them from cooperating with congress in order to expose wrong-doing by the President himself. And so, Madison said that is why we must have the power to impeach.”

He further said that Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi is wrong for having said that impeachment was off the table. Impeachment is the cure for the Constitutional Crisis we find ourselves in with the Bush Administration and that Congress was being derelict in their duty under the Constitution for not fixing the great wrong that has been done by this Administration.

Here is some of the transcript showing Mr. Fein's view (keep in mind he drew up the Impeachment of President Clinton and was a Reagan era DOJ lawyer):

BRUCE FEIN: Well, this is an unusual affair of president/vice-president, where the vice-president is de facto president most of the time. And that's why most of people recognize that these decisions, especially when it comes to overreaching with executive power, are the product of Dick Cheney and his aide, David Addington, not George Bush and Alberto Gonzalez or Harriet Miers, who don't have the cerebral capacity to think of these devilish ideas. And for that reason, they equate the administration more with Dick Cheney than with George Bush.

BILL MOYERS: Bruce, you talk about overreaching. What, in practical terms, do you mean by that?

BRUCE FEIN: It means asserting powers and claiming that there are no other branches that have the authority to question it. Take, for instance, the assertion that he's made that when he is out to collect foreign intelligence, no other branch can tell him what to do. That means he can intercept your e-mails, your phone calls, open your regular mail, he can break and enter your home. He can even kidnap you, claiming I am seeking foreign intelligence and there's no other branch Congress can't say it's illegal--judges can't say this is illegal. I can do anything I want. That is overreaching. When he says that all of the world, all of the United States is a military battlefield because Osama bin Laden says he wants to kill us there, and I can then use the military to go into your homes and kill anyone there who I think is al-Qaeda or drop a rocket, that is overreaching. That is a claim even King George III didn't make--

BRUCE FEIN: --at the time of the Revolution.

Put Impeachment Back On The Table, Madam Speaker.