An Embarrassment of Riches

-
I'm dismayed, but I probably shouldn't be surprised, at the paucity of coverage being afforded to the hearings the House Judiciary Committee began today on Dennis Kucinich's proposed impeachment resolutions (I've linked to a page displaying only some of Kucinich's proposals). It's not just the New York Times (the word "impeach" doesn't appear anywhere on the electronic front page of America's purported newspaper of record). It's leading liberal blogs, including the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Washington Independent, and Matt Yglesias. To their credit, Glenn Greenwald and Kagro X on Daily Kos give the hearings something like the extensive treatment they deserve, and Politico's John Bresnahan discusses some of the day's developments helpfully, too.

It's hard not to see the deafening silence as a reflection of the intra-Beltway consensus that sensible people really can't take seriously the notion of impeaching a President for acting on the basis of what he may have regarded as raison d'etat. The supposedly "adult" view seems to be that finicky moralism shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of good-faith efforts to advance the national interest. (The enthusiasm of the Administration's supporters for "law and order" does not, apparently, extend beyond dealing with the [real or imagined] wrongs of the socially marginal.) The impeachment process, we are repeatedly assured, should not be used to settle political scores.

The reality, however, is that this isn't, isn't remotely, a close call. Impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney wouldn't be a matter of punishing dedicated public servants for a few good-faith errors in judgment. As regards solid justifications for impeachment, we suffer from an embarrassment of riches.

Consider such examples as
  1. the manipulative initiation and prosecution of the Iraq war, reasonably seen as a predicate for murder liability
  2. the approval and encouragement of torture
Obstruction of justice, politically motivated prosecution, disregard for Congressional authority (and so for the need for public scrutiny and accountability), denial of due process rights--the range of egregious violations is enormous.

The hearings will go nowhere unless members of the public make clear to the members of the Judiciary Committee and the House leadership that they are disgusted with the Administration's lawlessness and contempt for human rights. Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all have good reason to insist, in potentially surprising unison, that today's pre-impeachment hearings lead to serious consideration by the Committee and the full House of the case for trying George Bush and Dick Cheney and removing them from office.

Of course Bush and Cheney are about to leave office. But I believe we need to do what we can to impede their ongoing illegal conduct. And we need to make clear to their successors that becoming President does not mean receiving carte blanche to do whatever one claims to be in the national interest.

UPDATE: those interested in supporting Kucinich’s efforts by signing a petition he is circulating can do so here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
On that crucial note, it's becoming clear that the business as usual Beltway mentality is rearing it mushy middle head again. As Glenn Greenwald notes earlier this week, we're losing something like accountability when even an Obama administration signals that it would not investigate/prosecute the folks who have been stonewalling/lying to Congress recently. As Jonathan Turley notes, this leaves Americans little - outside of pranks - in the way of checks on the power of their public servants.
July 27, 2008 at 10:42 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians for Redistribution

-
Libertarianism is a redistributive project. That’s another way in which radical market anarchism is rightly seen as part of the socialist tradition. Statists on both the left and the right favor the redistribution of wealth. Libertarians, by contrast, are often assumed to be dead-set against all varieties of redistribution. But it’s important to see that whether this is really the case or not depends on how we answer several questions: Agent : who effects the redistribution? Rationale : what justifies the redistribution? Means : how is the redistribution accomplished? Statist Redistribution For statists, the agent of redistribution is the state. The rationales for redistribution are primarily consequentialist —it’s seen as designed to bring about some favored end-state—though it may also be used to punish the putatively undeserving and to reward the arguably virtuous. The means ? The creation of monopolies, the enactment of regulations, the confiscation of proper...
Read more

Nicholas Lash (1934-2020)

-
I learned a few minutes ago that Nicholas Lash had died earlier today. Nicholas was a brilliant, incisive philosophical theologian who was by far the most formidable member of the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge during the time I was a PhD student. He was, as far as I'm aware, the first Catholic to hold a chair in the Faculty since the Reformation. (A laicized priest married to a former nun, he was not, like many people with similar profiles, an enemy of his church. He remained unapologetically and obviously Catholic.) Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and the holder not only of a PhD but also of an earned DD from the university, he was an elegant prose stylist whose work was rarely simple—he sought to remind us repeatedly of the complexity of thought, language, and the human situation—but always stimulating and insightful. He engaged with a broad range of topics and figures—from Newman (the subject of his dissertation and first book) to Marx to William Jame...
Read more

Socialism revisited

-
I'd like to try to tie together and expand my observations re. the great “socialist”/“capitalist” terminological debate that’s been proceeding at C4SS and AAE . “Socialism” as Genus; “State-Socialism” as Species I think there is good reason to use “socialism” to mean something like opposition to: bossism (that is to subordinative workplace hierarchy); and deprivation (that is, persistent, exclusionary poverty, whether resulting from state-capitalist depredation, private theft, disaster, accident, or other factors . “Socialism” in this sense is the genus; “state-socialism” is the (much-to-be-lamented) species. Indeed, using the “socialist” label provides the occasion for a clear distinction between the genus “socialism” and the species “state-socialism.” Thus, it offers a convenient opportunity to expose and critique the statist assumptions many people reflexively make (assumptions that make it all-too-easy for political theory to take as given the presupposition that its subject...
Read more