[Sosfbay-discuss] NY Times OpEd: Congress Has the Power to Impeach Gonzales

[Wes Rolley]

For those of you who don't think I am following the impeachment issue.
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Good piece - worth reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/opinion/03bowman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin 


Op-Ed Contributor
He’s Impeachable, You Know
By FRANK BOWMAN
Published: May 3, 2007*

*IF Alberto Gonzales will not resign, Congress should impeach him. 
Article II of the Constitution grants Congress the power to impeach “the 
president, the vice president and all civil officers of the United 
States.” The phrase “civil officers” includes the members of the cabinet 
(one of whom, Secretary of War William Belknap, was impeached in 1876).

Impeachment is in bad odor in these post-Clinton days. It needn’t be. 
Though provoked by individual misconduct, the power to impeach is at 
bottom a tool granted Congress to defend the constitutional order. Mr. 
Gonzales’s behavior in the United States attorney affair is of a piece 
with his role as facilitator of this administration’s claims of 
unreviewable executive power.

A cabinet officer, like a judge or a president, may be impeached only 
for commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But as the Nixon and 
Clinton impeachment debates reminded us, that constitutional phrase 
embraces not only indictable crimes but “conduct ... grossly 
incompatible with the office held and subversive of that office and of 
our constitutional system of government.”

United States attorneys, though subject to confirmation by the Senate, 
serve at the pleasure of the president. As a constitutional matter, the 
president is at perfect liberty to fire all or some of them whenever it 
suits him. He can fire them for mismanagement, for failing to pursue 
administration priorities with sufficient vigor, or even because he 
would prefer to replace an incumbent with a political crony. Indeed, a 
president could, without exceeding his constitutional authority and 
(probably) without violating any statute, fire a United States attorney 
for pursuing officeholders of the president’s party too aggressively or 
for failing to prosecute officeholders of the other party aggressively 
enough.

That the president has the constitutional power to do these things does 
not mean he has the right to do them without explanation. Congress has 
the right to demand explanations for the president’s managerial choices, 
both to exercise its own oversight function and to inform the voters its 
members represent.

The right of Congress to demand explanations imposes on the president, 
and on inferior executive officers who speak for him, the obligation to 
be truthful. An attorney general called before Congress to discuss the 
workings of the Justice Department can claim the protection of 
“executive privilege” and, if challenged, can defend the (doubtful) 
legitimacy of such a claim in the courts. But having elected to testify, 
he has no right to lie, either by affirmatively misrepresenting facts or 
by falsely claiming not to remember events. Lying to Congress is a 
felony — actually three felonies: perjury, false statements and 
obstruction of justice.

A false claim not to remember is just as much a lie as a conscious 
misrepresentation of a fact one remembers well. Instances of phony 
forgetfulness seem to abound throughout Mr. Gonzales’s testimony, but 
his claim to have no memory of the November Justice department meeting 
at which he authorized the attorney firings left even Republican 
stalwarts like Jeff Sessions of Alabama gaping in incredulity. The truth 
is almost surely that Mr. Gonzales’s forgetfulness is feigned — a 
calculated ploy to block legitimate Congressional inquiry into 
questionable decisions made by the Department of Justice, White House 
officials and, quite possibly, the president himself.

Even if perjury were not a felony, lying to Congress has always been 
understood to be an impeachable offense. As James Iredell, later a 
Supreme Court justice, said in 1788 during the debate over the 
impeachment clause, “The president must certainly be punishable for 
giving false information to the Senate.” The same is true of the 
president’s appointees.

The president may yet yield and send Mr. Gonzales packing. If not, 
Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzales would be 
politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of 
impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper 
than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether 
Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional 
authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration 
that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an 
attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia 
on its behalf.

/Frank Bowman is a law professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia./

-- 

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; 
We must do. –Leonardo DaVinci
Wesley C. Rolley
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