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At the Heart of Who We Are As a People
By John Frohnmayer
10/03/07 "The
Oregonian " -- - Suppose you hire a person to
check groceries but, instead of doing so, he tells customers to
put their items back on the shelves. Do you fire him? Of course
you do.
Now suppose we hire a president whose constitutional job
description is to “take care that the laws be faithfully
executed.” Instead, he issues more than a thousand signing
statements saying, in effect, he’s not going to execute parts of
the very laws he has signed. Do we fire him? Of course we do.
Impeachment is not a political issue. It’s a constitutional
issue. The U.S. Constitution describes impeachment more fully
and carefully than practically any other power delegated to
Congress. Impeachment is mentioned six times in the Constitution
as the remedy for any misbehavior of our high officials. Yes,
President Clinton’s impeachment was a political circus, but
impeachment of President Bush is necessary to maintain our
government’s separation of powers, our checks and balances, our
Constitution’s integrity.
While The Oregonian’s recent editorial (”The emptiness of
impeachment,” Sept. 29) opined that impeachment would be
“pointless,” my view is that it is essential because, after all,
the Constitution is the “supreme law of the land.” What could be
more important than preserving the rule of law? It is the
bedrock of our democratic society.
Let me give you an example of a signing statement, this one
issued on March 9, 2006, when Bush signed the renewal of the USA
Patriot Act. Part of the signing statement says: “The executive
branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for
furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch
. . . in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional
authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to
withhold information . . . which could impair the deliberate
process of the executive.” In other words, Congress cannot
expect the reports of FBI activities that the law requires. Not
only will President Bush not enforce the law, but he also has
told Congress to pound sand.
As The Oregonian points out, Congress has “waived its own
oversight responsibilities.” But just because Congress is
weak-kneed doesn’t mean that we ought not to require it to
execute its constitutional duties — for the House to impeach and
the Senate to try President Bush on the basis of his refusal to
take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
There may not be much time left. There may not be much political
will among our elected representatives. But this issue goes to
the very heart of who we are as a people. Either we are a nation
of laws, or we are nothing.
President Bush has taken the oath of office prescribed for him
in the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully
execute the Office of President of the United States, and will
to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States.” Instead, he has engaged in a
concerted course of constitutional vandalism.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “Our lives begin
to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
John Frohnmayer, a Corvallis lawyer and former head of the
National Endowment for the Arts, is running as an Independent
Party candidate for the U.S. Senate.
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