Censure

This past Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s proposed resolution to censure President Bush for breaking the law with his warrant-less domestic spying program. Invitees to the hearing included John Dean who told the committee that President Bush's domestic spying exceeds the wrongdoing that toppled his former boss Richard Nixon.“Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented,” Dean said. “Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.”

Well said.

There are two sides to this issue: substance and politics.

When it comes to substance, we must ask ourselves the following questions: Did Bush break the law? Did he lie about it? Does it warrant censure? Given the facts, the answer is unequivocally yes on all counts. Federal law is clear that the NSA must obtain a warrant from the FISA court (set up to specifically to create a process for this) in order to spy on American citizens. Only partisan hacks maintain that any kind of inherent executive authority or war powers allow the President to get around this. As for the second question, Bush said in April 2004, "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so,” at the very time they were using this program. The last question is where we come to the political side.

Critics accuse Senator Feingold of proposing this resolution in order to help his potential bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. However, the facts show that he was the only Democratic Senator to vote against a motion to dismiss Congress' impeachment case of President Bill Clinton, so it would appear hard to credibly question his integrity on this matter. Republicans, on the other hand, are being hypocritical. Though many of them, including Arlen Specter the Chairman of the Judiary Committee, admit that the program was unlawful, they call cries for censure outrageous. Senator Hatch said Friday that to try and censure the President during a time of war would hurt our troops. Republicans apparently failed to consider this when in Feburary of 1999, led by John McCain, they voted to remove the Command-in-Chief from office on the eve of the war in Kosovo.

Certainly, logic follows that if Clinton’s lie in a civil suit about sex warranted impeachment, certainly Bush breaking the law and being dishonest about doing so warrants censure. Now admittedly, there are many Democrats who are unsure of whether to support Feingold’s resolution. And that’s why we need to let them know that we think the rule of law is important and no one is above it, not even the President. Now I understand people are wary of such punitive actions becoming frequent in the political arena, but the Senate has a chance to restore them to their proper use: actions used only in the rarest and gravest of circumstances where someone has shown contempt for our laws and Constitution that which President Bush has so clearly done.