Impeachable Offenses

Recently PBS's Bill Moyers Journal devoted a full hour to the subject of impeaching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney--the first such attention by a national network. The remarkable thing about the response was not its size or intensity. After visiting more than a dozen states to address the issue, I have come to understand the depth of the public's desire for accountability. But it was only after Moyers invited conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein and me to lay out not merely the specific grounds for impeachment but the historical rationale for applying the "heroic medicine"--the Founders' preferred cure for a constitutional crisis--that I fully understood the extent to which Americans recognize that this is about a lot more than the high crimes and misdemeanors of a regal President and his monarchical Vice President. The stakes are enormous: If Bush and Cheney are not held accountable, this Administration will hand off to its successors a toolbox of powers greater than any executive has ever held--more authority, concentrated in fewer hands, than the Founders could have conceived or would have allowed.

Among the thousands of responses after the program aired in mid-July, there was a steady theme: This is no longer a partisan issue. Inside the Beltway, the calculus these days rarely gets beyond the next election; but outside it there are tens of millions of Americans worried about the next generation--indeed, about the fate of the Republic. To be sure, there are Bush haters among their number, fierce partisans who--in an echo of the Republicans who a decade ago went after Bill Clinton--have adopted a "by any means necessary" approach to the goal of cutting short the Bush/Cheney tenure. But the national conversation in which we engaged after the Moyers program aired suggested that they are a minority of the 54 percent of Americans who tell pollsters it's time to open impeachment hearings on Cheney's misdeeds, and the only slightly smaller number who favor the process for Bush.

The Washington elites still try to dismiss the impeachment movement as an ill-considered reflexive reaction to a President Americans don't like and a Vice President they fear--or, worse yet, as some sort of partisan payback. But the plain truth is that most of those who responded to the Moyers discussion recognize that the point of impeachment is not the transitory crimes of small men but the long-term definition of great offices. Fein, an official in the Reagan Justice Department, and I come from different points on the ideological spectrum, but we agree that the Founders intended impeachment less as a punishment for officeholders than as a protection against the dangerous expansion of executive authority. If abuse of the system of checks and balances, lies about war, approval of illegal spying and torture, signing statements that improperly arrogate legislative powers to the executive branch, schemes to punish political foes and refusals to cooperate with Congressional inquiries are not judged as high crimes, the next President, no matter from which party, will assume the authority to exercise some or all of these illegitimate powers.

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