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Corrupt Government Title: Impeachment Drumbeat Grows Louder Impeachment Drumbeat Grows Louder By Susan Jones http://CNSNews.com Senior Editor October 18, 2006 http://(CNSNews.com) - For a variety of reasons, Democrats are criticizing the military tribunals bill that President Bush signed into law on Tuesday -- but it's the "stealth pardon" for "war crimes" allegedly committed by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that upsets one Democrat the most. Former U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a New York Democrat and a Bush impeachment advocate, issued a news release on Tuesday, saying that President Bush, by signing the military tribunals bill, "has created a "culture of impunity" for himself and others who allowed the "torture and abuse of detainees," such as that at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Holtzman complained that the new law sanctions the abuse of foreign detainees in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and suspends habeas corpus in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. Democratic control of Congress "would make impeachment a serious reality," Holtzman blogged Tuesday on the Huffington Post. According to Hotlzman, passage of the military tribunals bill provides another important reason for impeachment -- because it "guts" the War Crimes Act of 1996, a Clinton-era law that made it a federal crime to mistreat detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions. (The Bush administration has complained that some provisions of the Geneva Conventions are vague, and he pressed Congress for clarification. See earlier story.) Said Holtzman in a news release on Tuesday, "When a president violates the country's criminal laws and then gets a secret grant of immunity for those crimes, he makes a mockery of the rule of law. Then all lawlessness is permissible." Holtzman said the "immunity" provision was slipped secretly into the bill, without hearings or debate. "Most members of Congress, most reporters and most Americans have no idea that this has happened," Holtzman said. She accused President Bush of striking a "horrific blow" at democratic values and the U.S. constitutional system. "Instead of pardoning himself with the complicity of Congress, the President should be making public what acts of prisoner abuse he authorized the CIA to undertake or what acts of theirs he ratified," Holtzman said. The New York Democrat has been advocating Bush's impeachment for months, and she has co-written a new book "analyzing the illegal, unconstitutional and/or impeachable actions" of the Bush administration. In a January 2006 article posted on the Nation website, Holzman cited the president's alleged "scorn" for international treaty obligations, "torture scandals," the war in Iraq, and the secret wiretapping program, intended to eavesdrop on terrorists who contact people in America. "As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush," Holzman wrote in January. "While impeachment is a last resort, and must never be lightly undertaken (a principle ignored during the proceedings against President Bill Clinton), neither can Congress shirk its responsibility to use that tool to safeguard our democracy. No President can be permitted to commit high crimes and misdemeanors with impunity." In the January article (the one posted on the Nation's website), Holman notes that she sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. "As a Democrat who opposed many of President Nixon's policies, I still found voting for his impeachment to be one of the most sobering and unpleasant tasks I ever had to undertake. None of the members of the committee took pleasure in voting for impeachment; after all, Democrat or Republican, Nixon was still our President." As the midterm election draws closer and the drumbeat for impeachment grows louder, it appears that in the case of George W. Bush,some Democrats would take great pleasure in impeaching this particular president. The Republican Party has warned that for Democrats, impeaching Bush is what the midterm election is really all about.
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