Madam Speaker, it is time for a new exit strategy, one that removes the Vice President of the United States from office, voluntarily, if he chooses, but by impeachment if he stonewalls. The time has…
Madam Speaker, it is time for a new exit strategy, one that removes the Vice President of the United States from office, voluntarily, if he chooses, but by impeachment if he stonewalls.
The time has come for the Vice President to go. Our Nation and our national security interests at home and abroad cannot afford to have this Vice President one heartbeat away from the Presidency. As it stands now, the Vice President's damage to U.S. interests, security, system of government and our position at home and abroad will take years to overcome.
As my constituents in the State of Washington's Seventh Congressional District know, I have struggled mightily with this matter for a long time. In grave matters facing our Nation, I believe conscience and a deep respect for our system of government should guide our actions and words.
I didn't hesitate to speak the truth to power before the invasion of Iraq, despite the bitter partisan acts that I knew would follow. I have no doubt that I will be targeted for a new round of shelling after these remarks.
The intent of this administration and this Vice President has been to silence all dissent, and it always happens the same way; relentless attacks until people ask themselves, do I want to subject myself to that kind of hell if I speak out? Fear is what kept this administration in office in 2004, and fear is the only public discourse this administration understands and practices. Why debate, when you can dictate? Why follow the law, when you can act like you are above the law?
For months, I believed that impeachment was a dire course of action. Over these same months, I have seen the haven't repeatedly drive our Nation into increasingly dire situations in Iraq, Iran and within our country as he tramples on the Constitution like it was a doormat.
For months I have considered if America would best be served by bringing forth articles of impeachment against the Vice President. I kept asking myself, is the Vice President's conduct that dire, because impeachment is the closest thing there is to internment on political death row.
The Founders intended impeachment to be used when those running the government forgot that they worked for the people, and the Founders intended impeachment to be used when toughs running the government acted as though they were above the law.
When you look at the record, you have to conclude that the Vice President has placed himself above the law. He holds himself accountable only to special interests, who meet with him in secret with no record kept of who was there, what was discussed or what promises the Vice President made.
For the last 4 years, the Vice President has refused to allow routine office inspections by a Federal agency regarding the safe handling of America's secrets. The Vice President defies the Information Security Oversight Agency, claiming he is not part of the executive branch of government. When a sitting Vice President claims that he is not part of the executive branch of government to which he was elected, it is time to remove him.
The Vice President holds himself accountable to no one. He ordered the Secret Service to destroy visitors logs, and we have learned in the Washington Post recently, that the Vice President circumvented every check and balance inside the White House to force through his own agenda, to spy on Americans through illegal wire traps, creating the gulag at Guantanamo, and subverting civil liberties and free speech at every turn.
Since the President permits the flagrant disregard of the Constitution, it is up to the Congress to act and defend the American people. With each new revelation, America has seen only glints of what has been done totally in secret.
For all we don't know, this much we do know: The Vice President holds himself above the law, and it is time for the Congress to enforce the law. I believe the evidence is overwhelming and the articles of impeachment against the Vice President should be drawn up.
The Vice President likes to say the military option is on the table. Tonight it is time to say the impeachment option is on the table.
I am adding my name to H.R. 333, calling for the impeachment. For the good of the Nation, the Vice President should leave office immediately. Call it a medical condition, call it a political condition, call it what it is; the departure of a person who forgot that he works for the American people.
The Vice President must either resign or face impeachment.
Madam Speaker, I submit for the Record an article in Slate magazine dated 27 June 2004, entitled ``Impeach Cheney.''
[From Slate.com, June 27, 2007]
Impeach Cheney--The Vice President Has Run Utterly Amok and Must Be
Stopped
(By Bruce Fein)
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.
Take the vice president's preposterous theory that his
office is outside the executive branch because it also
exercises a legislative function. The same can be said of the
president, who also exercises a legislative function in
signing or vetoing bills passed by Congress. Under Cheney's
bizarre reasoning, President Bush is not part of his own
administration: The executive branch becomes acephalous.
Today Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington refused to
renounce that reasoning, instead laughably trying to diminish
the importance of the legal question at issue.
The nation's first vice president, John Adams, bemoaned:
``My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most
insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived
or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good
nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet common
fate.'' Vice President John Nance Garner, serving under
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, lamented: ``The vice
presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm * * *.'' In modern
times, vice presidents have generally been confined to
attending state funerals or to distributing blankets after
earthquakes.
Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion's share
of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney
has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that
all checks and balances and individual liberties are
subservient to the president's commander in chief powers in
confronting international terrorism. Let's review the record
of his abuses and excesses:
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. The Supreme
Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney
claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy
combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's
say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King
Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the
storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney
in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret
detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of
suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been
answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against
CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney
would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin
to kidnap American tourists in
Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they
were suspected of Chechen sympathies.
The vice president has maintained that the entire world is
a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power
may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on
American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with
al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to
kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when
he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's
then-suspected ties to international terrorism.
Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture
in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.
He has advocated and authored signing statements that
declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of
bills he has signed into law that he proclaims are
unconstitutional, for example, a requirement to obtain a
judicial warrant before opening mail or a prohibition on
employing military force to fight narco-terrorists in
Colombia. The signing statements are tantamount to absolute
line-item vetoes that the Supreme Court invalidated in the
1998 case Clinton v. New York.
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. He concocted
the alarming theory that the president may flout any law that
inhibits the collection of foreign intelligence, including
prohibitions on breaking and entering homes, torture, or
assassinations. As a reflection of his power in this arena,
today the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Cheney's
office, as well as the White House, for documents that relate
to the warrantless eavesdropping.
The vice president has orchestrated the invocation of
executive privilege to conceal from Congress secret spying
programs to gather foreign intelligence, and their legal
justifications. He has summoned the privilege to refuse to
disclose his consulting of business executives in conjunction
with his Energy Task Force, and to frustrate the testimonies
of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers regarding the firings of U.S.
attorneys.
Cheney scorns freedom of speech and of the press. He urges
application of the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists who
expose national security abuses, for example, secret prisons
in Eastern Europe or the NSA's warrantless surveillance
program. He retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and
his wife, Valerie Plame, through Chief of Staff Scooter
Libby, for questioning the administration's evidence of
weapons of mass destruction as justification for invading
Iraq. Mr. Cheney is defending himself from a pending suit
brought by Wilson and Plame on the grounds that he is
entitled to the absolute immunity of the president
established in 1982 by Nixon v. Fitzgerald. (Although this
defense contradicts Cheney's claim that he is not part of the
executive branch.)
The Constitution does not expressly forbid the president
from abandoning his chief powers to the vice president. But
President Bush's tacit delegation to Cheney and Cheney's
eager acceptance tortures the Constitution's provision for an
acting president. The presidency and vice presidency are
discrete constitutional offices. The 12th Amendment provides
for their separate elections. The sole constitutionally
enumerated function of the vice president is to serve as
president of the Senate without a vote except to break ties.
In contrast, Article II enumerates the powers and
responsibilities of the president, including the obligation
to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A special
presidential oath is prescribed. Section 3 of the 25th
Amendment provides a method for the president to yield his
office to the vice president, when ``he is unable to
discharge the powers and duties of his office.'' There is no
other constitutional provision for transferring presidential
powers to the vice president.
Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress,
President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice
President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the
25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that
the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of
the presidency and who should be held responsible for
successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs
political accountability by continually hiding the real
decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post
has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a
four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.
In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain
or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is
because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in
the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for
his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the
Constitution and the rule of law.
