- by Alan Adaschik

According to our Constitution, the executive power of the United State shall be vested in a President whose powers and responsibilities are as follows.

General:

• The President shall be bound by oath to support the Constitution.
• The powers of the President are:
• Serve as Commander in Chief of the Army, Navy, and State Militias.
• Grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
• Make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate.
• Appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate.
• Veto laws not overridden by a two-thirds vote of Congress.

The responsibilities of the President are:

• Advise Congress as to the state of the Union.
• Fill vacancies of the Senate when it is in recess.
• Recommend legislation to Congress.
• Convene and adjourn Congress on extraordinary occasions.
• Receive ambassadors and other public ministers.
• Ensure that laws are faithfully executed.
• Commission officers.

Removal from office:

The President shall be removed from office on impeachment and conviction for treason, bribery, or any other criminal act committed while in office.

There you have it; the whole enchilada. The Office of the President of the United States is governed by a Constitution as summarized above. At first glance it seems these requirements are inadequate. However, a careful reading reveals this is not the case.

The President, as our Chief Executive, is bound by oath to support the Constitution including the catch all provision which stipulates that he will not assume or wield any power not provided to his office. Therefore, our President is nothing more than a facilitator or an administrator with limited and narrowly defined responsibilities. Furthermore, being tasked with ensuring that our laws are faithfully executed, he is also our highest law enforcement official and has a sacred duty to ensure that all government officials, him included, obey the law. No citizen is above the law, and this is especially true for government officials and our President.

Understanding the foregoing, when should a President be impeached and removed from office. The answer to this question is simple. Like any other person, he should be fired for failing to properly fulfill his duties and responsibilities. Being an elected official and our Chief Executive confers no special privileges upon our President as far as tenure in office is concerned. However, firing a sitting President is no simple matter. Individuals, work for one boss who is judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to being fired. In contrast, the office of the President of the United States is a separate branch of our government. Furthermore, as Chief Executive, our President has no supervisor. For these reasons, our Constitution provides a procedure and the criteria which must be met in order to fire the President.

Before going on, it is important to understand the limited nature of an impeachment proceeding. Even though the trigger for impeachment is a criminal act, our Constitution provides that punishment for impeachment will be limited to removal from office and the disqualification to hold office. This restriction exists to preclude offending officials from being held accountable twice for their crimes. The Constitution further specifies that an impeachment proceeding does not replace or satisfy the legal mandate for wayward officials to face justice in a court of law. Therefore, impeachment is nothing more than a constitutional procedure for removing offending officials from office so they will not benefit from the authority of their office while subsequently being tried in a court of law and also so their office will not be burdened or handicapped by the fore mentioned criminal proceedings. It is entirely possible and permissible for an elected official, including our President, to be permanently removed from office by impeachment and then acquitted of wrongdoing in a court of law.

Our Constitution specifies that our President may be impeached and if convicted, removed from office for treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. This provision seems clear and easy to understand but unfortunately, this is not the case because of confusion over the word “high”. Many people, especially those in government, hold that “high” refers to an especially heinous crime, worse than most others. While government officials find solace and job security in this interpretation, it couldn’t be further from the truth. The word “high”, as used in our Constitution refers to the level of the office held by an offending official. In other words, a high crime is not a crime worse than others, but one committed by a high government official. The truth is that our Constitution holds public officials accountable for any crime committed while in office even misdemeanors.

The House of Representatives retains the power of impeachment. However, this is a discretionary power and the House may or may not impeach according to how a majority of the House votes. This being the case, when should a Representative vote to impeach? According to our Constitution, officials judged to be guilty of treason or bribery should be impeached, but nothing more is said about which other crimes are impeachable. However, bribery and treason have a common trait. Both are breaches of the public trust and here we have the pivot upon which the criteria for impeachment turns. Members of the House of Representatives should vote to impeach anytime a public official commits a crime which constitutes a breach of the public trust. This makes good sense! A public official’s primary responsibility is to serve the public and if he or she commits a crime that does otherwise, he or she is not doing their job properly and should be fired.

It should now be clear that our President, while being the Nation’s Chief Executive is really a facilitator or an administrator with defined and limited duties and responsibilities. Furthermore, as the Nation’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer, our President has a duty to ensure that the laws of our Nation are faithfully followed by those in government, including himself. If he fails in this regard, he has violated the Public’s trust and failed to do his job properly. As a result, the President should be impeached and removed from office to face justice for his crime or crimes in a court of law. To hold otherwise implies that our President is above the law, can allow other government officials to break the law, has the authority to break the law himself, and is accountable to no one, not even the citizens who elect him. This is pure and unadulterated hogwash.

Having a clear understanding of the duties and responsibilities of our President, and the provisions of the constitutionally defined impeachment process, it is incumbent to ask whether or not President George Bush should be impeached?

George Bush, the Decider, is not a President who functions under defined and limited authority. Kings and dictators are above the law, have the power to disobey or enforce it at will, and their edicts and pronouncements are the law. George bush has assumed these nefarious powers. He deliberately and willfully violates established laws, the provisions of our Constitution, the agreements within our treaties, and the international laws of nations. Not only does George Bush ignore laws when it suits his purposes he has even gone so far to write his own law in the form of signing statements, whereby in writing, he tells Congress and the Nation which new laws, in whole or in part, he will not enforce or obey. This situation has progressed so far into the Land of Oz that now George Bush has invoked what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory. This discredited and arcane theory holds that the office of President is paramount and not equal to the other branches of government. As a result, under Unitary Executive Theory, the President may act unilaterally without constraint or question by Congress and our Supreme Court.

In keeping with his unconstitutional and wrongfully assumed powers, President Bush has wire tapped and invaded the privacy of citizens without a warrant, arrested people and delivered them to hostile foreign authorities to be tortured, condoned and authorized torture in violation of the Geneva Convention, incarcerated foreign nationals and Americans without due process, denied those arrested counsel and the right to a speedy trial, and invaded a foreign nation for false and fabricated reasons. To justify these wrongful and illegal actions, President Bush states that he has a duty to protect the lives and property of the American people. Apparently, President Bush does not understand that prior to 9/11, the laws in force then were more than sufficient to allow him to protect our lives and property. Furthermore, the steps he has taken have not enhanced our safety and security, but instead, the opposite is the case and they have also served to make this Nation a pariah among nations. The bitter irony here is that Americans have been forced to pay a tremendous price for the destructive and wrongful actions of George Bush. We have lost our freedom, our right to privacy, our civil and inalienable rights, the right to live free of a dictatorial and oppressive government, and the very essence of what it means to be American.

It should be clear that there is nothing Presidential about George Bush and he has assumed dictatorial powers over this Nation and over other nations that do not measure up to his standards. Should President George Bush be impeached for his crimes? This is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask if the House of Representatives does not impeach, then what crimes and actions do they consider impeachable? Aside from treason, bribery, and crimes such as murder, robbery, child molestation, etc., I am at a loss to think of any. Clearly then, under the deplorable circumstances we now endure, not only is impeachment incumbent upon Congress, but if they shun their responsibility in this regard, then history will judge that they stood by did nothing while America became a Fascist dictatorship.

President George Bush has acted so far outside the rule of law and the commonly accepted norms of civilized society, that impeachment is incumbent upon Congress and necessary to save the United States of America from the clutches of tyranny. As a citizen of this Nation, I call upon the House of Representatives to act now. If this request is ignored, the only consolation we have is the knowledge that Representatives who fail to support an impeachment action will burn in hell forever.