Impeach Cheney

A good friend of mine sent me this link.

Looks like the calls of Impeachment are more spreading further across the ideological map. This time it's Bruce Fein, chairman of American Freedom Agenda.

Fein, you'll recall, served as Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. He's been an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation and a lecturer at the Brookings Institute. Hardly a liberal.

He wrote recently at Slate.com:

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify. [emphasis added

He lists the reasons. After discussing briefly the "preposterous" reasoning that sought to remove Cheney's office from the Executive Branch, Fein goes deeper:

The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions,which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes.

And:

The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists.

And:

The vice president engineered the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program targeting American citizens on American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

And so on...