Wednesday, December 04,
2019
Ukraine?
Yes. But Trump Must Also Be Impeached for Obstruction
This is about the specifics of a constitution that can only work
if the president cooperates with congressional investigations.
commondreams.org/views/2019/12/04/ukraine-yes-trump-must-also-be-impeached-obstruction
When
the House Judiciary Committee was preparing to vote on articles of impeachment
against a sitting president in the summer of 1974, a former justice of the
peace from Watertown set the stage when he declared, "President Nixon's
conduct in office is a case history of the abuse of presidential power."
Congressman
Robert Kastenmeier, by then a senior member of the Judiciary Committee and one
of its most respected members, was not merely focusing on the most obvious high
crimes and misdemeanors that had been uncovered during the Watergate inquiry.
He was speaking of the attempts by Nixon and his aides to thwart that
uncovering.
This
is important to remember as the House Judiciary Committee now turns its
attention to the question of whether to impeach another president. As with
Nixon, the abuses of office that President Trump has engaged in are dramatic.
He stands accused of blocking aid to Ukraine as part of an effort to get that
country’s government to launch an inquiry aimed at embarrassing a key rival to
Trump’s 2020 re-election run, former Vice President Joe Biden.
But
Kastenmeier, who left the committee in 1991 and passed away in 2015, at age 91,
would undoubtedly remind his successors to pay close attention to Trump’s
attempts to meddle with, undermine and prevent the current inquiry. It is often
said of Nixon’s downfall that “the cover-up was worse than the crime.” The same
holds for Trump.
It
now seems clear, a number of Judiciary Committee Republicans who are willing to
suspend the system of checks and balances in order to serve their political
master.
Trump
and Nixon are, to be sure, different figures in our history. Nixon was a former
member of the U.S. House and Senate who had served as vice president. He knew
the ways of Washington and thought he could game the process by obstructing it.
But, like Trump, he got caught when his own aides began to testify against him.
What they revealed was, in the words of former White House counsel John Dean,
“a cancer growing on the presidency.”
Dean
recalled suggesting to Nixon that “if the cancer was not removed the president
himself would be killed by it.” But, in a very real sense, the cancer that
extends from efforts to obstruct legitimate investigations into wrongdoing by
the executive is more than that. It is a threat to the presidency itself, to
the system of checks and balances, and to the constitution that the founders of
the American experiment established 232 years ago.
The
first article of impeachment against Nixon recognized this. It explained that
“in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of
President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of
his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” Nixon
had “prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice.”
Specifically,
he was charged with “interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct
of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution
Force, and congressional committees.”
It
was well understood then—among both Republicans and Democrats—that
"interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of
investigations" of alleged wrongdoing by a president and those around him
constituted an impeachable offense. And it should be well understood now.
If a
president can get away with obstructing an inquiry, he can avoid
accountability. If that prospect exists for a president, any president, then
the system of checks and balances collapses.
This
is a point that Kastenmeier made to the Judiciary Committee in regard to the
refusal of the Nixon White House to cooperate with congressional subpoenas.
“Without the power to subpoena papers, materials, things necessary, the
Congress cannot meet its constitutional responsibilities. I submit that for the
chief magistrate to prevent the Congress from meeting its congressional duty,
its constitutional duty, is no different than when the president himself
violates the Constitution. The offense is just as grave.”
What
the Judiciary Committee must recognize this week, as it ponders the evidence
against Trump, is that it must look beyond the Ukraine scandal. There has to be
a consideration of all the issues raised by Trump’s refusals to cooperate, his
witness tampering, and all the other evidence of obstruction. And that evidence
must be gathered together and presented to the full Congress in articles of
impeachment.
There
will be, it now seems clear, a number of Judiciary Committee Republicans who
are willing to suspend the system of checks and balances in order to serve
their political master. But that cannot change the truth that is self-evident:
Donald Trump engaged in a pattern of conduct that invites comparison with the
conduct that led the House Judiciary Committee to approve articles of
impeachment against Richard Nixon. Democrats on the committee (and any
responsible Republicans who might finally feel the call of conscience) must
shoulder the burden of the present and the future by taking obstruction issues
seriously, and by addressing them in articles of impeachment.
This
is not about the specifics of what has been learned and what has not been
learned by the impeachment inquiry up to this point. This is about the
specifics of a constitution that can only work if the president cooperates with
congressional investigations. As Kastenmeier explained to the committee 45
years ago, when it was considering an article of impeachment dealing with
Nixon’s refusal to provide materials subpoenaed by the House. “This committee
said at the time we needed this material,” he said. “The president at the time
said he would refuse to turn the material to us. We measure this particular
article in the time in which it is seen, not in terms of whether subsequent to
that fact we have or have not acquired sufficient evidence to make the
determinations we are set upon today.”
Robert Kastenmeier and his colleagues on a committee that
focused serious attention on obstruction issues got it right in 1974. Now, his
successors on the Judiciary Committee must do the same.
© 2019
The Cap Times
John Nichols is
Washington correspondent for The Nation and
associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent
book, co-authored with Robert W. McChesney is, Dollarocracy:
How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Other
books written with McChesney include: The Death and
Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World
Again and Tragedy &
Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy.
Nichols' other books include: The “S” Word: A
Short History of an American Tradition, Dick: The Man
Who is President and The Genius of
Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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