The Next Hurrah: Impeachment and Accountablity

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http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/07/impeachment-and.html

Impeachment and accountability
by Kagro X

Josh Marshall notes, in the wake of the NYT editorial, that the impeachment of a cabinet secretary has only been undertaken once in our history, and noting "the big 'unless'":

Unless the president is party to the wrongdoing that placed the cabinet secretary in jeopardy. And that is clearly the case we have here, which explains the historical anomaly that the possibility of Gonzales' impeachment is even a topic of serious conversation.

In light of that big unless, I would remind you of this, for which we can thank James Madison:

(If) the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds (to) believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty...

That quote was originally offered in a Daily Kos piece, in connection with the Scooter Libby pardon. But it's equally applicable to the Gonzales situation.

As is this, from eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.:

Obviously a President need not be impeached because an obscure official buried deep in the endless bureaucracy, someone he does not know and probably has never heard of, does something wrong. But it is an extraordinary idea that a President is not responsible to some degree for the behavior of those intimates with whom he chooses to surround himself in the White House and the Cabinet.

Schlesinger, writing here in May 1974, is speaking of the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon in an article I've cited numerous times before entitled, "What if we don't impeach him?" (PDF) And his arguments are eerily prescient of the predicament we face today:

The practical point is irresistible. If Mr. Nixon did not know what his right-hand men were doing, it was only because he did not wish to know. He had every facility in the world for finding out. And if Congress should decide that a President is no longer to be held broadly accountable for the conduct of his most personal appointees, it would obviously encourage future Presidents to wink at every sort of skulduggery so long as nothing could be traced to a specific directive from the Oval Office.

What, exactly, do you think all this, "I don't recall" business is designed to do? Wink, wink.
Schlesinger continues:

- snip -

Elections are the extent of the people's ability to demand accountability, in George W. Bush's mind. And he wants them to be the extent of accountability in your mind, too. The failure even to hold Gonzales accountable for his part in this would be a complete abdication of the Congress' responsibility to preserve and exercise an absolutely critical element of the ongoing scheme of accountability designed by the Founders. It was to the Congress that the Founders entrusted the only mechanisms of mid-term accountability that could be brought to bear directly on the president and his administration. Giving that up would be an error of incalculable magnitude.

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1. Cross-posted here:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/7/29/143725/550