Pulitzer Prize-Winning History Prof's Op/Ed: Americans Should Fight For Impeachment of Bush & Cheney [View All]

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http://www.pressconnects.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070506/OPINION/705060321/1005/OPINION

Sunday May 6, 2007
GUEST VIEWPOINT
Americans should fight for impeachment of Bush, Cheney

By Herbert P. Bix
For the past six years the Bush/Cheney administration has set aside all standards of international law and morality regarding the use of force. On issues of the utmost public importance they have governed by lies, misstatements, and omissions of facts. Their campaign of deceit, amplified by the U.S. corporate media, helped to take a frightened American public into two illegal wars in violation of the UN Charter and the Constitution. Since then, their policies have spread violence and strife throughout the world, making the United States an object of unprecedented global hated.

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For these "high crimes and misdemeanors" more and more Americans are now demanding their removal from office. Two-thirds of the nation has seen in President Bush's last, incoherent State of the Union address, and his tactic of escalating the war in Iraq, that he will not set a deadline for a withdrawal of all troops, bases, and mercenary contractors from Iraq. Bush is clearly unwilling, perhaps even incapable of reversing course and ending his misconceived "war on terror." Disgusted and angry with this administration of rightwing ideologues and unindicted lawbreakers, the American people have every reason to want their representatives in Congress to end the Bush-era and the Bush wars. But until Election Day, they lack the power to make them do so.

The leading presidential candidates are committed to sustaining U.S. global dominance and, at this moment in our crisis of constitutional government, have no use for those who demand that the House begin impeachment investigations. These career politicians see nothing to gain for themselves by upholding the Constitution, or passing laws that would actually cut off funding for the lost war in Iraq. Surely this is all the more reason why we-the-people must step up our demand that Congress gauge correctly where unchecked executive power is leading the nation. We need to begin the constitutional procedure of drawing up articles of indictment of the president and vice president, voting on those articles in the House, then trying them in the Senate. If two-thirds of the Senators agree, Bush and Cheney can indeed be convicted; their term will end; and they will be removed from office and become subject to criminal indictment.

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Despite these realities, impeachment can succeed even in failing, for it is as much a political maneuver as a constitutional "tool." An impeachment process that is constantly propelled from below carries within itself the potential to advance a democratic agenda that goes beyond the circumstances that brought it about. One of its positive effects would be to weaken the dangerously expanded powers of the executive branch. The very attempt to try Bush and Cheney might also help Americans to envision a saner role for themselves in the world, and to have that role reflected in a foreign policy that locks in respect for international law as well as respect for universal norms regarding the treatment of any captives in war.

Herbert P. Bix of Vestal is a professor of history at Binghamton University. His biography "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" received the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.