| I've got to be honest. For a long time, I've been one of those nay-sayers on impeachment -- it's too time-consuming, do we really want Cheney, we don't have the votes to convict, yada yada yada.
But increasingly, I'm very amazed by how outside the realm of possibility the issue is treated.
I mean, let's just ignore illegal wiretapping, secret prisons, Gitmo, torture, stonewalling of Congress, executive 4th branch privilege, and everything else.
In his commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, the White House lied (again -- really, this is about as surprising as a newborn pooping himself). From Patrick Fitzgerald's statement: - We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.
- We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as "excessive." The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing. In other words, Mr. President is full of crap. But that's not news. What is news is that this President thinks anyone deserves to have a sentence reconsidered.
This is a guy who while running for President, wrote the following: I don?t believe my role [as governor] is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own, unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair. As Republican law professor Orin Kerr notes,[W]hether Scooter Libby's original sentence was exactly correct is an interesting question I can't answer; while I have a rough sense it was in the right ballpark, I didn't follow the case closely enough to have any particular views of that. Nonetheless, I find Bush's action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received. President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead. Come to think of it, I don't know if Bush has ever actually used his powers to get one single person out of jail even one day early. If there are such cases, they are certainly few and far between. So Libby's treatment was very special indeed. Shocking. Utterly shocking.
As Marcy Wheeler, who has tirelessly followed this entire scandal and is one of the nation's leading experts on Plamegate, notes -- there's a good reason for a commutation, rather than a pardon. Good reason -- at least if you're the President. A pardon would wipe away Scooter's 5th Amendment protections against implicating himself -- which would make him a target for Congressional inquiries into what really happened. With a commutation, but not official declaration of the purging of his record, Scooter still has his 5th Amendment protection. In other words, he can't squeal on the President or the Vice President -- two men clearly knee deep in the decision to out a clandestine CIA officer.
Kagro X, who has advocated vocally for impeachment for a while, found this damning exchange from the Constitutional Conference: n the [Constitutional] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or, before indictment or conviction, "to stop inquiry and prevent detection." James Madison responded:
"[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds [to] believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty..." So the question is simply this, Congressional Democrats, pundits, and national media -- the President has made it abundantly clear that he does not care whatsoever for the rule of law. At what point do any of you start expressing concern over maintaining the most basic fabric underlying America's existence as a free republic?
Granted -- more investigations might reveal that the smoke isn't coming from fire. But investigations are clearly warranted. |
