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Congress Opposes Bush Pardons
Nadler Introduces Resolution Opposing Possible Bush Pardons of His Own Subordinates for Crimes He Authorized
By David Swanson
Here's a resolution, hot off the presses from Jerrold Nadler, Chair of the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee: H.RES.1531, "Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the President of the United States should not issue pardons to senior members of his administration during the final 90 days of his term of office," Sponsor: Rep Nadler, Jerrold [NY-8] (introduced 11/20/2008). There is a petition promoting this resolution, through which you can write to your representative and senators at
http://democrats.com/nadler-pardons
Text of resolution and count of cosponsors:
http://www.democrats.com/nadler-pardon-resolution
Senator Russ Feingold editorialized against these possible pardons at Salon.com yesterday; please urge him to introduce in the Senate the same resolution that Nadler has in the House.
Never before has a president pardoned himself or his subordinates for crimes he authorized. The idea that the pardon power constitutionally includes such pardons ignores a thousand year tradition in which no man can sit in judgment of himself, and the fact that James Madison and George Mason argued that the reason we needed the impeachment power was that a president might some day try to pardon someone for a crime that he himself was involved in. The problem is not preemptive pardons of people not yet tried and convicted. The problem is not blanket pardons of unnamed masses of people. Both of those types of pardons have been issued in the past and have their appropriate place. The problem is the complete elimination of any semblance of the rule of law by pardoning one's own subordinates for crimes you instructed them to commit.
Yes, of course, there's something absurd about knowing that a president authorized crimes, not impeaching him, not prosecuting him, not proposing any action with any teeth at all, but formally objecting to the idea of him issuing pardons of his own subordinates for crimes he authorized. But this is where we are. State, local, civil, foreign, and international prosecutions are likely ways of holding Bush, Cheney, and gang accountable, and pardons can't interfere with them. Pardons can't interfere with impeachment. But if we allow these pardons, we not only guarantee no federal prosecutions, and not only give Congress an excuse to drop its investigations, but we also establish the precedent that from here on out any president can violate any law and then pardon the crime. This is simply to end the idea of law. We cannot allow that.
We need to work with Congressman Nadler and Senator Feingold to promote awareness of what is wrong with self-pardons. In this way we can prepare the American public for the appropriate response when the pardons come. The appropriate response will be to demand:
1. Immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney, even if they are out of office.
2. Overturning of the pardons, as Bush's lawyers told him he could do to Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, which was a far more minor abuse of the pardon power.
3. Legislation banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.
4. A Constitutional Amendment banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.
5. Prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates for their crimes.
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It is inconceivable that the very real possibility exists that the President may pardon himself and aides who have operated at his direction for numerous crimes including
1) A war of aggression in Iraq and the murders of now 4,200 U.S. servicemen and women who have died because he and his aides deliberately misled the American people into believing that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. and that Iraq had in some way supported the terrorist attacks on 9/11
2) Warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens in violation of the FISA Act
3) Torture, rendition and cruel and unusual punishment of detainees
4) War crimes associated with the Iraq invasion and occupation,
http://www.consumersforpeace.org/pdf/war_crimes_iraq_101006.pdf
Consumers for Peace with the help of
Karen Parker President of Association of Humanitarian Lawyers
“War Crimes Committed by the United States in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accounability”
October 10, 2206
5) Crimes against the Constitution by unilaterally reinterpreting U.S. law and legislating from the executive office with "signing statements"
6) Crimes against the Constitution by declaring himself the Unitary Executive and placing himself above the Judicial and Legislative branches of our government
This granting of a self pardon or pardons to those he directed to break the law flies in the face of the entire history of law: no man can sit in judgment of himself.
Please support the Nadler Resolution on Bush Pardons and support immediate impeachment hearings to begin to return our country to the rule of law.
Nick Egnatz
NW Indiana Veterans For Peace
a "sense of the Congress" would mean to Mr. Bush. I will call my MOCs and urge support. But that's it. I will not waste more time with these miscreants on a hopeless goal. They have made the Constitution a dead letter long ago.
A public execution of Bush and Cheney would be justice served. We will not get justice and there will be no peace. The glorification of Obama by the delusional Left has assured more years of Clintonomics and a smarter deadly foreign policy.
The dominance of two political parties is killing this country and the apologists for those parties are able to shout down any opposition. As long as we are trapped in this bipolar world, we are doomed to continue down the corporate path.
Nader and Paul and Kucinich and others have made the case to deaf ears.... We get what we apparently deserve.
Majority Voting
Dilemma: a situation necessitating a choice between equally unfavorable or disagreeable alternatives.
Democracy: government in which people hold the ruling power, either directly or through elected representatives.
The election structure in the American two-party political system is anti-democratic. It is so because the two parties shut everyone else out of the process. Lincoln best defined democracy as government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” A more apt description of our present government would be “of the parties, by the parties and for the parties.”
The monopoly the two parties enjoy has neither been ordained by the Constitution nor enshrined into law by the Congress. So how do they maintain their stranglehold on our government? Other democracies all across the globe require the winner of an election to garner a majority of the votes cast. Not so in the US. Our Electoral College system requires the winner to get the majority of electoral votes and designates to the states the requirements for how those electoral votes are determined. Since the winner needs the majority of electoral votes, we are fooled into thinking that we have majority elections. Not only can the winner win with a minority of the national popular vote, as both Bush and Clinton did, but the winner can win with a minority in each state. All he or she needs is more votes than the second place candidate.
Why is this undemocratic? To use Lincoln’s definition of government “of the people, by the people and for the people” certainly implies that a majority of the people support said government. Therefore at the most basic level of elections, a majority of votes should be required to win.
What is the net effect of the minority winner system we have? It has allowed two parties to exclude all others from the process. We now have government of the two parties. The two parties have no fiduciary duty to the citizens and what has developed over the years is that the two parties are solely interested in perpetuating their continued two-party rule. Of course there are exceptions with individual politicians, but they can only buck their party so much and almost all, even some of the best intentioned, end up servants of the party and not the people. The only basic difference between the present US and the USSR before it broke up, is that we have two parties that offer the illusion of choice and they had one which offered no such illusions.
Abolishing the Electoral College is only the start. It should be done because your vote does not have the same worth in each state. In Wyoming a state with a population of 522,000 and 3 electoral votes, 174,000 residents translates into one electoral vote. In California, a state with a population of 36,553,000 and 55 electoral votes, it takes 664,000 residents for each electoral vote. Thus each individual vote in Wyoming is worth 3.8 votes in California. This is undemocratic anyway you look at it and needs to be changed.
But simply changing from the Electoral College to a popular vote will not solve the problem of minority elections that we currently have. By not forcing a candidate to get a majority of the citizens’ votes, the major parties have been able to successfully stifle any challenge to their dual rule. This is where the dilemma is. Citizens are forced to compromise their most strongly held beliefs and not vote for so called third party candidates because they will waste their vote and allow the worst candidate to win. Or they vote their principles and risk allowing the candidate they most disagree with to win.
A simple illustration is the participation of Ralph Nader in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
In 2000 Nader received 2.9 million votes, 2.74% of the total cast.
In 2004 Nader received .4 million votes, .3% of the votes cast.
Why did Nader’s 2004 vote totals shrink to 1/7th of the 2000 number, especially during a time when opposition to the Iraq War (which Nader had opposed from its inception) was starting to visibly grow? The answer is obvious. Many Americans blamed Nader for costing Gore the 2000 election and they did not want to waste their vote and allow George Bush another term. They almost completely ignored the candidate whose positions many of them loved, because they didn’t want to waste their votes.
What do other countries do? They require a run off election between the top two polling candidates if no candidate gets a majority in the original election. This allows voters to show their support for the views of the so called minor candidates, while still being able to vote for the “lesser of two evils” in the run-off election.
Look at the upcoming 2008 election. There is little doubt that the majority of Americans want an expeditious end to the Iraq debacle, single payer national healthcare and were almost unanimously against bailing out Wall Street. Yet neither of the two major party candidates supported these positions and the two candidates (Nader and Cynthia McKinney) who support all these positions will receive a very small percentage of the vote. If we had majority voting, Americans would be free to support Nader and McKinney in the first go around and move over to Obama in the run-off election, without the fear that they would be giving the election to McCain. Majority voting also would allow Republicans to vote first for a libertarian or fiscal conservative. It is equal opportunity for both sides of the political spectrum.
To make majority voting easier, Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV) has been developed. Multiple elections are not needed as the voter simply votes for the candidates in his order of preference. If a candidate polls more the 50%, he is the winner. If not, the votes move up the line from the bottom candidates until we have a winner at more than 50%.
Majority elections with Run-Off Voting would make 3rd and 4th party candidates viable and force the two major party candidates to actually listen to the electorate. 100% public financing and paper ballots are also needed to clean up the election process. Without majority voting though, we are doomed to the tyranny of the American two-party system.
Nick Egnatz, Munster, IN
NW Indiana Veterans For Peace
After the American people gave Bush and Cheney four more years in the 2004 election, I said I guess we're getting what we deserve. Stupid leadership, for a stupid people. Our MSM doesn't help either when it uses terms like enhanced interrogation techniques instead of calling it what it really is....TORTURE! Recently the media has been bringing the crimes and illegalities to light, but our Congress still refuses to uphold their sworn oath to Defend The Constitution.
The Republican party will continue to put loyalty to the party over loyalty to their Country and Constitution. They were the enablers of the worst Pres administration in our nations history, and without their rubber stamping and full support the Bu$hCo crime cabal could not have done all their damage. They deserve to be held criminally accountable for their part too.
The Democrats will continue to be so spineless that no matter what the magnitude of the crimes and law breaking (War Crimes, War Profiteering, Constitution shredding...) they're too cowardly to do anything about any of it. This Bush administration is exactly what kept our framers of the Constitution tossing and turning at night. They knew a criminal Pres administration would come along sooner or later. That's why they carefully crafted the checks and balances to do something about it.
They provided a remedy right in the Constitution. It's called IMPEACHMENT! Unfortunately, the Republican enablers/accomplices, and cowardly/spineless Democrats in Congress didn't use the remedy, and those checks and balances went down the toilet. I guess House Speaker Pelosi thinks her sworn oath to Defend The Constitution is only "Symbolic, and non binding". History needs to record the Congressional failure correctly along with the Bu$hCo crime cabal.
Jeff Morris-Saugerties, N.Y.- DeJaVu57
Nothing to add to your note, because it is all
perfectly accurate. Which is all I wanted to say.
The vise that Democrats and Republicans have on the electoral process is a power that I do not know how to fight.
DonP Let me see how this worked, Congress opposes the Iraq war. Congress votes to fund the Iraq war. Congress opposes warrantless wiretapping. Congress passes legislation granting powers to perform warrantless wiretaps. Congress opposes the Patriot Act. Congress renews the Patriot Act. Do you see a pattern here? Congress issues suponeas to members of the administration. Congress is told to go f^^k themselves. Congress goes on recess. Depend on Congress, but hope that prosecution for war crimes and human rights violations will be conducted by someone other than this bunch of spineless traitors.
For some time people have been wondering how the historical Presidential legacy of George W. Bush will read. That it will be terrible, is now almost universal in consensus. I'm now thinking how the legacy of the most authoritarian, abusive of power, secretive, Vice President in U.S. history should read also. I will never understand how so many questionable actions of Bush/Cheney went unchallenged for so long. I will never understand how the legality of so many of their actions weren't challenged by Congress, or in the courts, much sooner.
During the run up to the Iraq invasion, our nation and our news people must have been asleep or under the spell of post 9-11 induced opportunistic Patriotism. VP Cheney and his office were perhaps the biggest offenders in the cherry picking and manipulation of pre war intelligence, the exaggerated claims of dire threats, and the main authors of why Iraq posed such an imminent threat to the U.S. that a preemptive invasion was necessary for our National Security.
The sixteen words of yellow cake uranium from Niger, the bogus threat of the consequences coming back to us in the form of a mushroom cloud, and other phony exaggerated threats, were for the most part drafted by the VP and his office. In the end Bush/Cheney sold it to Congress and the American people and got their permission slip for the unnecessary invasion. Which brought nothing but death and destruction to a nation and people who had nothing to do with 9-11, and who never posed any real threat to the U.S.
Once the invasion started, VP Cheney then awarded hundreds of billions of dollars in no bid contracts to his old company (Haliburton) only. Talk about a vested interest in wanting to start the unnecessary war! Talk about a conflict of interest! Yet Congress, and sadly a good portion of the American public, didn't question this all very much. I still have a hard time wondering how this was legal. Five and a half years later we now see how it's cost us as a nation dearly. In troop deaths, in a record deficit, in a badly damaged image around the World....
If you examine the worst offenses of this Bush/Cheney administration ( exaggerated threats in the run up to the Iraq invasion ,Torture policies, Guantanamo Bay, exposure of an undercover CIA agents identity, NSA warrant less spying program, Military Commissions act, Patriot Act.... they seem to have a common thread. Follow the trail back and they all lead to the same place. VP Cheney and his office. The man is a War Criminal, War Profiteer, and a true demonic scoundrel to the worst degree.
Sometimes I think I know why the Republicans at the top picked Bush back in 2000 to be their Presidential nominee. They needed someone just dumb enough to wake up every morning, look himself in the mirror, and say "I'm the President Of The United States". Also someone dumb enough to never figure it out that he isn't the one really calling the shots, but rather our real "shadow President" Darth Cheney called the shots and got everything he wanted! Including hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money siphoned from the U.S. Treasury and into the coffers of his old Company!
Jeff Morris-Saugerties, N.Y.- DeJaVu57
the Federal Reserve, so nothing that might upset the staus quo will be tolerated. Even a liberal black democratic president will not be allowed to adversly affect the Fed's stranglehold/power. Do a web search on what JFK had to say about the Federal Reserve and reverting back to the gold standard in June of 1963, oddly enough, right before he was killed in November of 1963.
Unless it has already been done and I missed it, why isn't Colonel North on the pardon list. He was made the fall guy for a deal gone wrong that was done at the request of the President at that time. I feel he should have a complete pardon and is military retirement reinstated and, if possible, made retroactive.
The pardon of Oliver North is an example.