December 28, 2005

Conservative Business Magazine, Barron's, Excoriates Bush for Committing a Potentially Impeachable Offense

In case you missed it over the holidays, that bastion of commie pinko liberalism, Barron's, more than mentions the "i" word.

The article is online here (requires registration) but you can read it in its entirety here.

Unwarranted Executive Power
The pursuit of terrorism does not authorize the president to make up new laws


[snip]

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

[snip]

Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: "It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.

"Wrong. If we don't discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy -- in the mirror.

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