REASONS FOR IMPEACHMENT

It’s all fine and dandy to laugh at Dick Cheney and cast him as a human-devouring, A. E. Van Vogt space monster, but, something has to be done about that bastard. I lifted this impeachment plan from a much longer piece in HuffPo that had in turn lifted it from Slate. I’m not a lawyer but it holds water for me.

"A bill of particulars against the vice president has been sketched by constitutional law expert and former Justice Department official in the Reagan years, Bruce Fein, in Slate of June 27: "Impeach Cheney: The Vice President has Run Utterly Amok and Must Be Stopped." He urges the House Judiciary Committee to 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." Moreover, Fein posits that President Bush has outsourced a major share of his presidency to Vice President Cheney. Here is his review of the record of Cheney's 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."
- 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 vice president "initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists...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 Qaeda."
- Cheney "has championed a presidential power to torture in contravention of federal statutes and treaties."
- Cheney "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."
- 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."
- 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."
- Cheney "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." (Does Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald think that the vice president, and not just Scooter, was involved in obstructing justice?)
- Fein puts forward a provocative argument questioning what could be termed a sanctioned coup d'etat: "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." 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."
But "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."
Bruce Fein's conclusion: "Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law."

The secret word is Thirteen