As Democrats rolled toward victory last year, Nancy Pelosi promised that impeachment would be "off the table." But if President Bush completely ignores congressional subpoenas of his key aides, Pelosi has the perfect reason to put it back on the table.
May 2006
Seeking to choke off a Republican rallying cry, the House's top Democrat has told colleagues that the party will not seek to impeach President Bush even if it gains control of the House in November's elections, her office said last night.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) told her caucus members during their weekly closed meeting Wednesday "that impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it," spokesman Brendan Daly said.
Pelosi's strategy had its points. Impeachment is a long process, it would require a lot of legislative energy, and perhaps take away from the Democrats' efforts to to spread their own message. It certainly would be divisive, and even if Bush were impeached, the almost evenly divided Senate would not deliver the two-thirds vote necessary to remove. Impeachment could also be perceived as an overly political move meant to exact revenge for what happen to Clinton.
A better path, Pelosi likely thought, would be to investigate, bring all of the salacious facts to light, and let voters think about the criminal nature of the administration when they went to the polls in 2008.
But Pelosi's strategy was probably also predicated on one basic assumption. No matter how corrupt and destructive Bush has been in the past, she assumed that his administration, like every other one before, would obey Congressional subpoena requests, like every other administration has done in the past. Unfortunately, if this is the case, she underestimated the craveness of the Bushies.
And the subpoenas are THE key...as Kagro X has noted,
[L]et's look at the mechanics of subpoena power. In its investigative capacity, Congress has adopted for itself the use of a subpoena power that's roughly analogous to that more commonly seen in the judicial and law enforcement system, in which government prosecutors (employees of the executive branch) leverage the power of the judicial branch (in the form of its ability to sentence those brought before it for contempt, should they defy the subpoenas) to ensure compliance with the demands made.
But Congress is not the executive branch. Nor is it the judicial. Its independent enforcement powers are limited to only the most obscure and archaic procedure -- "inherent contempt" -- which hasn't been exercised since 1935, and with good reason: this procedure itself requires a trial before Congress. Not a particularly helpful substitute when you're trying to avoid a trial before Congress [read: impeachment] in the first place.
Instead, Congress depends for its enforcement powers on the executive branch. If you defy a Congressional subpoena, you face the possibility of charges of contempt of Congress, pursuant to the adoption of articles by whichever house is charging you. But those charges are not self-executing. In other words, they're a request that charges be brought. In order to be effective, those charges still have to be prosecuted in court, and that's up to the discretion of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. He's an employee of the "unitary executive," of course, and reports to the Attorney General.
So if you're conducting oversight of, say, the NSA spying program, and you want answers from Gonzales regarding the program's legality, and you subpoena him and he tells you to take a flying leap, what do you do?
What you do is put impeachment back on the table. Pelosi said impeachment was off the table. But obviously implicit in her vow was an assumption that Bush would to a certain extent respect the authority of Congress. Instead, he is pulling a Milosevic ("I don't recognize the authority of this court").
Impeachment is a weapon the Democrats could do well to at least pick up, if not fire. They can set up an impeachment committee. They can hold hearings. At some point, it might take on a momentum of its own, making impeachment inevitable.
But before that happens, ignoring congressional subpoenas might suddenly not sound so good to Bush. And if Bush just continues to give a big FU to Congress, let him be impeached. He will probably not be removed by the Senate, but at this point, he is not going to get a lot of sympathy from the public, and at the very least he deserves to have that black mark on his record, and the Democrats can be remembered for putting up a fight.
Impeachment might well be Congress' best shot at reasserting itself.