Pelosi Asks for Impeachable Offenses [View All]

Pelosi Asks for Impeachable Offenses
Submitted by matthewg on Thu, 2007-10-11 08:15. Discussion

by Phil Burk, 10/10/07

Pelosi continues to insist that "Impeachment is off the table". But in an October 10th interview with Ed Schultz, she said "if anyone knows of impeachable offenses that can pass the Congress, then please let me know". She then goes on to say that Bush has "taken us into a war under false pretense", and "gone outside the law in terms of the collection of information".

So she is obviously aware of the fact that Bush misled Congress and conducted illegal wiretaps in violation of the FISA law. But she is apparently unaware that these are impeachable offenses.

Let us look first at the issue of misleading us into war. This is clearly a "high crime" in the sense that only someone in high office could lead Congress into authorizing a war. The consequences of this war have been catastrophic, as we all know.

Is lying to Congress an impeachable offense? Let us consider the words of Founding Father and later Supreme Court Justice James Iredell at the North Carolina Constitutional Convention.

The topic was impeachable offenses:



This perfectly describes how false information was provided to Congress by Bush and Cheney in order to convince them to approve the use of military force in Iraq.

Now let us consider the second crime, going "outside the law in terms of the collection of information". Pelosi was undoubtedly referring to Bush's admitted violation of the FISA law against warrantless wiretaps. Bush cannot argue that he simply needed to wiretap terror suspects because the FISA law allows him to do that at any time and then seek approval from the FISA court within 72 hours. There is concern that Bush was actually gathering information on American citizens who were not criminals or terror suspects.

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