Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) calls for the formation of a Congressional committee that would look into executive encroachments on the Constitution and the legislature, a committee that would be bipartisan and analyze past actions that have led to increased presidential power. (0:44)
Bruce Fein says Congress has surrendered to the increased power of the president by being unresponsive to decisions made by President Bush. (0:51)
Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) says it is not debatable that President Bush has ordered officials in the administration not to testify to Congress, saying this abuse of executive privilege meets the Constitutional standard for impeachment. (1:14)
Jeremy Rabkin from the U.S. Institute of Peace says that if people believe that the president “knowingly, deliberately” got the country into war for reasons completely unrelated to national security, then “of course the action would be impeachable.” However, Rabkin says that nobody has tried to explain the “conspiracy theories,” and says that how anyone can even find it “plausible” that “such a charge” is worth investigating is “so demented.” (1:56)
Vincent Bugliosi, the author of “Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” says that the “terrible reality” is that the Bush Administration has gotten away with thousands upon thousands of murders. Bugliosi says that the evidence for the impeachment charges put on former President Bill Clinton were “infinitely less significant” than those found under the Bush Administration. He says that based on the evidence written in his book, Congress should not have “any difficulty making a criminal referral to the Department of Justice” in order to commence a criminal investigation of the Bush Administration. Bugliosi says that every American should be outraged by what the Bush Administration has done. (1:29)
Republicans told the House Judiciary Committee that political disagreements, no matter how large, are not grounds for impeachment proceedings at a hearing discussing appropriate Congressional responses to Bush abuses of power. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said the hearing served no purpose other than anger management, stating that no evidence exists which supports grounds for impeachment and that the hearing’s lack of bipartisanship affected Congress’s already low credibility.
Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) said the Bush White House is unprecedented in its distortion of executive privilege, noting Bush’s alleged falsification of pre-Iraq war intelligence and approval of certain interrogation techniques. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) stated that the committee was attempting to solve an institutional problem,acting in a deliberative manner, not an accusatory manner. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) earlier had called Bush “the worst President our country has ever seen.”
In his testimony before the committee, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said pre-war justifications provided to Congress were untrue and that Congress had relied on the White House’s false statements while authorizing the Iraq war. Kucinich also said that Iraq posed no security threat to the United States and, since Iraq lacked a weapons program, Saddam Hussein was unable to harm the United States or arm terrorists. Congress’s decision now, Kucinich said, is whether it should defend the Constitution and prevent abuses of power in the Executive and Judiciary Branches.
Rep Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) said the White House has been dominated by corruption and incompetence, stating that the Bush administration ignored numerous warnings prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. He said the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to scale back troop levels in Afghanistan aided Osama bin Laden’s escape into the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. Hinchey suggested that it would have been more difficult to justify an attack against Iraq if bin Laden had been apprehended by the US military. Recognizing that impeachment had been referenced by many, Hinchey said the Bush administration, through the ways it violated the law, is “probably the most impeachable administration in the history of America.”
