Excerpt: Articles of Impeachment

(Editor's Note: this is an excerpt from the Center for Constitutional Right's new book, "Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush," reprinted with permission from Melville House, 2006.)

INTRODUCTION

How can it be that we are yet again debating another presidential impeachment? Still weary from the Clinton impeachment battles and now completely exhausted from the momentous changes brought about by both 9/11 and this president -- changes that include the Iraq war, indefinite detentions around the world, torture, domestic wiretapping, and more -- we have all we can do to understand and perhaps resist some or all of these measures on an ad hoc basis. While any of the individual acts and policies outlined in the following articles would constitute an impeachable offense, taken as a whole, as a pattern and practice, they constitute something far more sinister, a plan to significantly weaken, if not destroy, our democracy.

As a consequence this nation is confronted with a grave constitutional crisis. We have a president staunchly committed to acquiring unprecedented amounts of power and using it in ways that conflict with the Constitution of the United States, international law, and the common understanding of morality. In short, although the president has sworn to uphold the Constitution, he is doing just the opposite. He is dismantling the Constitution of the United States. Primarily, his apparent purpose is to gather even more power -- power unchecked by judicial or congressional scrutiny -- to a presidency already bloated with power.

Simultaneously, summary arrests, in the United States and around the world, torture, indefinite detention, illegal surveillance, and suppression of free speech and protest have become commonplace. Yet worse, as all of this has happened the government has sought to eliminate any judicial oversight of its activities by weakening the judicial system in innumerable ways. The president has also disregarded Congress and thereby attempted to weaken its role. The consequence has been that the fundamental building block of American democracy, our system of separation of powers, has come under lethal attack.

How did it come about that we are in the constitutional crisis in which we find ourselves today? Before we discuss the reasons for this, or even the historical context, it seems useful to introduce some of the terminology and details that surround impeachment, the Constitution's nuclear option.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provides that the president may be impeached for "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." This was the mechanism that the framers of the Constitution provided Congress to protect itself from executive overreaching. Clearly the framers drafted this provision in the context of what they viewed as the history of their time, i.e., the conflict between the actions of the English king and the ideals of the English law. Thus, for the framers, impeachment was a key element of American democracy in that it provided an ultimate means to curtail abuses of, or unconstitutional expansion of, executive powers.

While bribery and treason were technically defined crimes that would inevitably subvert the Constitution, the more general and less defined concept of high crimes and misdemeanors was intended to identify that activity whereby the executive overstepped the bounds of public office or failed to faithfully execute the laws. Hamilton viewed it as an abuse or violation of the public trust. Thereby the framers provided a much more general category whereby the Constitution would also surely be subverted.

To place the present moment into the context of history, in 1868 President Andrew Johnson was acquitted by only one vote of the accusation of denying Congress its power. It was claimed that the president, unmindful of the oath that obliged him to faithfully execute the laws, denied that the legislation passed by Congress was either valid, or that he was required to comply.