January 02, 2008

Why DOES Nadler oppose impeachment hearings????

Why Does Nadler Oppose Impeachment Hearings?

Today activists are staging a sit-in at Rep. Jerrold Nadler's office in Brooklyn to demand impeachment hearings, and Nadler's office is being inundated with calls. (Please add to the deluge by calling 202-225-5635.) Nadler's staffers are telling callers that Nadler opposes impeachment, but they won't say why.

I asked Nadler directly about impeachment in November and blogged it here. Mostly he gave the usual excuses, but his bottom line was quite shocking to me:

"Impeachment can never work, it wasn't designed for a two-party system, that's why we've never removed a President" he said. "So then we should tear up the Constitution?" I asked. "No we need a new Special Prosecutor law that would focus on truly impeachable offenses like abuse of power." "But we just got rid of the Special Prosecutor law because of Ken Starr," I said. "We can write a better law," he said. Yeah sure in 5 or 10 years, I thought to myself as someone else grabbed him.

I'm not precisely sure what his "two-party system" objection is, but I think he believes members of the President's party will always defend their President, regardless of the merits of the impeachment case, so it will never be possible to get a 2/3 majority in the Senate for conviction and removal.

That's the point Nadler made on 12/28/07 to Jay DeDapper of WNBC:

On the merits he should've been impeached, but I oppose impeachment because it would just divert everybody's attention and you'd never get the votes... impeachment for all practical purposes is unworkable. It's only been--really worked once in our history. It can't work because of political parties. You're not going to get two-thirds of the Republicans to vote for it.

The most obvious rebuttal is the impeachment of Richard Nixon. (I assume that's the "once in our history" Nadler briefly mentioned.) If it had come to a vote in the Senate, Nixon might have been acquitted by Republicans who put their party before the Constitution, and he also might have been convicted by Republicans who did the opposite - there's just no way to know.

But it doesn't matter whether Nixon would have been acquitted or convicted, because the mere passage of Articles of Impeachment by solid majorities of the House Judiciary Committee - not even the full House - was enough to convince two senior Republican Senators to visit Nixon in the Oval Office and persuade him to resign. And despite his absolute certainty that he had done nothing wrong, Nixon realized he had lost too much support and credibility to function effectively as President, and resigned.

Why did those Republican Senators make the trip? Because months of impeachment hearings convinced a majority of Americans that Nixon had committed impeachable offenses. Faced with overwhelming evidence, several Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee broke ranks with their President and voted for the Articles of Impeachment. Congressional Republicans who continued to defend Nixon came under increasing pressure from their constituents and local media.

How would Nadler answer this rebuttal? He'd probably say Congress was less divided in the 1970's, and there were more moderate Republicans like Senator Howard Baker and Rep. Robert Michel.

On the margin, there's probably some truth to this argument. Since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, moderate Republicans have mostly vanished.

But that's not the end of the political analysis. We're just 11 months from an election in which every Republican in the House plus 22 Republican Senators will have to face the voters.

That means there's plenty of time for the House Judiciary Committee to hold impeachment hearings and build a solid case for impeachment. As public support for impeachment builds, this will put tremendous pressure on Republicans. If they defy their constituents, they could lose their seats.

That's exactly how the Founding Fathers designed our democracy. It means there are practical limits to partisanship - if a Representative puts the interests of his party flagrantly ahead of the interests his voters, he will lose his job.

For Richard Nixon, public outrage trumped raw partisanship. I have no doubt that George Bush would face the identical fate - if only Jerrold Nadler would hold impeachment hearings as his constituents want - and as the Constitution demands.

BTW. Nadler's office numbers once again,
202-225-5635
212-367-7350
718-373-3198

Call him! Be a nuisance! This is what the Constitution's legal remedy IS. Don't let the next adminstration think it can get away with murder, corruption, lieing, torture, bankrupting the US ... think seven generations ahead!! This is our DUTY, notwithstanding people's PERSONAL agendas.

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