Wednesday, Truthout.org published a Tuesday Reuters report
Bush Agrees to Review Spy Program. That's to let the world know, hallelujah, Hayden's been cleared to exercise his discretion when answering his confirmation committee. Since Abu Gonzales' tongue got stuck in his zipper, "Democrats, who have long pushed for full hearings, said the change would bring the White House into compliance with the National Security Act of 1947, which requires the executive branch to keep Congress informed on intelligence matters." Whatevah ...
My brain was otherwise preoccupied by this wanking WaPo
Conyers' press release, snagged by
Armando. I sent Conyers my opinion of the matter before the sun arose. Somewhat long winded though my mail may be, it pings recent notes on bass-ackward party wisdom.
Ass. Somebody on Conyers' staff may hear me and pull his bumper up to Wikipedia's
Enemies List the next time the word Harman passes lips. Oh, hell! I already know what my mama's thinking.
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Sir,
In the article "No Rush to Impeachment," Washington Post, 18 May 2006, you expressed the sentiment that you would not "as the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, ... immediately begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush," if the Democrat party were to gain a House majority.
I am disgusted by your newly founded position toward the legitimacy of executive actions over the past five years. You seek appeasement from House majority brokers and the President now, as if without concern for implications of our future governance. You state:
So, rather than seeking impeachment, I have chosen to propose comprehensive oversight of these alleged abuses.
If you persist in promoting the idea of commissioning a Congressional "oversight" committee instead of a resolution of impeachment to inform your peers of the President's unethical and illegal directions of government activities, I will denounce you and the Democrat party: (i) I will abstain at federal election; (ii) I will encourage my peers to abstain from federal elections; and (iii) I will actively seek to disarm your authority and seniority in Congressional representation with your own record and by my own words of remembrance in every public media at my disposal.
I would rather suffer this indignity or quit my residence and citizenship of the United States of America than see you rewarded for ambivalence at our critical, historical period of Constitutional crisis. Unlike you, I will be relentless in the endeavors which are closest to my heart, in my fist.
You will, in the words of Joe Klein of Time, magazine, become an "embarrassment." The rule of law is printed, Sir, yet you lay aside the book. Rather than stand with it, you coax from memory some sense of prudence that is inappropriate either to discriminate legal standing or commonsense trust. You appeal to some colloquial necessity from which your constituents are utterly divorced. You state:
At the end of the process, if -- and only if -- the select committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, finds evidence of potentially impeachable offenses, it would forward that information to the Judiciary Committee. This threshold of bipartisanship is appropriate, I believe, when dealing with an issue of this magnitude.
You divine that the chair of the House Judiciary Committee will slip through your opened fingers, Sir. And Democrats on the Hill will continue their putative works in thrall of persons so corrupted by the vanity of their status and disdain for Constitutional rights of the people that no one could doubt your opinion of these effects again. Ever.
I would rather not imagine what internecine agreements separate you intellectually from your own judgment or politically from your constituents. At this moment, I am embarrassed by having endorsed your independence from the culture of corruption which characterizes our government.
In your own defense, you recall the most petty, least Constitutionally significant episode of Congressional "oversight" to exercise its impeachment power:
It was House Republicans who took power in 1995 with immediate plans to undermine President Bill Clinton by any means necessary, and they did so in the most autocratic, partisan and destructive ways imaginable.
While I recall the series of events, press investigation and personal risk, which summarily validated the impeachment procedure beginning 1973, ending 1974. You were there, I believe, "emerging as a leading black anti-Nixon spokesman" ... interesting. But what have your conveniently forgotten about popular ways and means of exacting justice?
In January, 2006, you convened the first and last Congressional hearing regarding "domestic surveillance and executive power, the so-called Basement Hearing, that followed The New York Times reporting of NSA activities and CIA personnel. Since then the press and numerous government employees of executive and military agencies have corroborated malfeasance and probable cause of federal criminal activity that operationalize Patriot Act powers. And at the time you stated:
There's no better illustration of that [constitutional] crisis than the fact that the President of the United States is violating our Nation's laws by authorizing the National Security Administration to engage in warrantless surveillance of United States citizens.
By May, 2006 you joined with Jane Harman (CA-36), ranking minority member of House Intelligence Committee and the subcommittees on Terrorism/HUMINT, Analysis and Counterintelligence; Oversight;Technical and Tactical Intelligence; and Intelligence Policy who voted YES to HR 3199 and did not sit at the Basement Hearing, to sponsor "LISTEN," HR 5371, legislation she did not bother to even properly identify in her blogosphere posts. This bill to "reiterate that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and title 18, United States Code, are the exclusive means by which domestic electronic surveillance may be conducted, and for other purposes" is redundant, absurd, in diverting warrant authority from the courts through the Attorney General to a Congressional "select" committee.
You are not alone in sponsoring this bill. But Harman surely has the only seat on your donkey.
What a gaffe. "Alleged abuses" created and promulgated by the Executive are now matters of fact, Sir. They are public knowledge viz. the Constitution's acts, the supreme law of the land. What is absurd in your remarks is a belief that Congress requires further, unwarranted discovery according to the the vanities of any bipartisan "select" committee.
Your leadership, your vision of justice, had been a touchstone for dissidence throughout the nation. It matters not what the spread suggests in any given poll of American approval opinion; you are my father's age. I suggest you reconsider your position and communicate unequivocally your intention to restore lawfully, immediately Constitutional rights enumerated and reserved to the people. If you wish to preserve the honors that are rightfully yours, your first order of business is to impeach the President.
Respectfully,