There's No Such Thing as a "post-inaugural" impeachment
This campaign is based on a fallacious legal assumption. There is no such thing as a "post-inaugural" impeachment. Impeachment is solely a device to remove a president from office. That is all it is. Once the president is out of office, the process is over and the issue is moot.
At this point, it is pointless to be urging legislators to impeach anyone. Congress isn't even coming back into session until January, about two weeks before the inauguration. All that Congress will do in that time is organize itself, including Senate confirmation hearings on Obama's appointees.
The impeachment train has left the station. Calls for a non-existent "post-inaugural" impeachment only make progressives look ignorant.
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There is such thing as "post-inaugural" criminalization
Although you may not be able to impeach Bush after he has completed his term in office, he will not be exempt from criminal prosecution. Just because his actions were carried out while he was the president does not mean he is to be held to a different criminal standard than the rest of us. And just because he will no longer be our president doesn't mean he is no longer a criminal. After a rapist is finished with his victim he is still a rapist, Bush will still be rapist after he is done raping other countries, our country, and our constitution.
But unlike the "rapist,"
But unlike the "rapist," Dubya can pardon himself, and the rest of his criminal band, before he leaves office. He can actually give himself a license to kill, rape, torture, and steal from the treasury.
The only thing that can prevent Dubya's blanket pardons, is impeachment. He doesn't need to be convicted in the Senate, but only impeached by the House, in order to take away his power to pardon himself.
Who is responsible ....
for pardoning us for our crime of failing to defend Liberty?
After the fact impeachment w/this Supreme Court, are you joking?
(MODERATORS NOTE: This post was overwritten in error, and should not be attributed to thomasn528).
do you have a precedent to cite for impeaching FORMER officeholders? no, you do not. so if impeachment post leaving office were attempted it would go to the Supreme Court. the only thing in the Constitution that discusses WHO can be impeached is this.
"The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
the Roberts opinion will conclude that this language only applies to CURRENT office holders. so just keep smoking what you're smoking. and if you get the munchies have a great big wish sandwich.
but the real point is that BOTH the people saying it's too late AND the people saying we can always do it later are cowards cut from the same cloth, without the political will to do what must and can only be done now.
we have the William Belknap precedent
of a Secretary of War who resigned after he was impeached in the House, but the Senate still put him on trial. Those Senators certainly believed they could impeach him after leaving office, which would deny him future office.
I don't see why the Supreme Court would accept an impeachment case for review, since the Constitution gives the power of impeachment exclusively to Congress.
Which is precisely why it MUST start now
Roberts will write that the Belknap precedent is not on point because impeachment was commenced while still in office, in other words he could not escape the other consequences of impeachment by resigning preemptively.
Nixon resigned to escape impeachment, but that was a deal to get him to step down, in exchange for refraining from continuing to press the impeachment charges.
but where Congress does not act, and the offender leaves office under no cloud of pending impeachment, we can expect cold comfort from Mr. Stare Decisis.
the comment above is not mine
"do you have a precedent to cite for impeaching FORMER officeholders?
no, you do not. so if impeachment post leaving office were attempted it
would go to the Supreme Court. the only thing in the Constitution that
discusses WHO can be impeached is this."
This comment isn't mine; mine got deleted or overwritten somehow. Is this a glitch, did someone hack the site, or has my password been filched somehow?
Thomas
Yikes. I'm not sure.
Please email Bob Fertik directly.
Thanks.
Jim
yikes indeed
i'll ask the geeks to investigate...
Are you on a shared computer?
If you stayed logged in, perhaps someone made a funny...
possible but unlikely
...I access this site from 2 locations and the computer goes to password protection pretty quickly in both spots. I'll be more vigilant about closing windows, but if there's a way to check on other possibilities, I'd appreciate it.
Again, the relevant
Again, the relevant articles of the Constitution are explicit that impeachment has both a removal consequence *and* a disqualification consequence. Article I, Section 3:
The bold part implies to most people that impeachment can take place after the person has left office. The lack of exquisitely precise precedent is neither here nor there; the text itself is clear, and the point of impeachment is clear -- you can't escape it by "running out the clock", or the legislative branch would be unconstitutionally prevented from protecting itself against the executive branch. There appears to be widespread agreement about this among constitutional scholars (e.g. Akhil Reed Amar).
= = = =
PS: Next time, thepen, don't write over somebody else's (my) comment without at least admitting what you've done. (I'm told by site admins that's what happened.) I'm not clear on how you got to even "edit" my comment, but assume you have some kind of special access to the site, since I don't see any way of writing over your comment.
Bush & Cheney Post Impeachment
If we can't impeach them, how about the country having a class action lawsuit against them, followed by a criminal lawsuit. Don't all court cases start with The state of... or Nation of ... against whoever. Well you can by the ways the laws are written get a city or state prosecuter to bring charges against these 2 men and their many accomplices in a state court.