Nancy Pelosi is Soft on Crime
Sun Jan 13, 2008 at 07:14:28 AM PDT
Back in the 60's when I was a kid, I remember a lot of talk about the Democrats being "soft on crime." I remember people telling me that if the Democrats were elected in 1968 that the country would go down the tubes because criminals were out of control, the cities were unsafe and the Democrats (who at the time had the presidency and large majorities in the legislature) were either unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
Forty years later, the Democrats were voted into the majority in both houses of Congress to stop a crime wave perpetrated by the Bush administration. Some Democrats are willing and even eager to do what they were elected to do.
Sadly, the Democratic leadership, with Nancy Pelosi running the show, is unwilling to try to do anything about these crimes.
These are no little crimes that Pelosi is blocking action on, either. These are serious crimes - felonies and violations of treaties - fomenting and prosecuting an illegal war, lying and manipulating intelligence to persuade the American people to support aggression against a foreign nation, spying on American citizens without a warrant, torture and other war crimes, obstructing justice and refusal to respond to lawful subpoenas. It's an impressive list.
A decent respect to the opinions of the electorate requires that Nancy Pelosi her coterie of obstructionist Democrats should declare the causes which impel them to disdain the Constitution.
Pelosi is always quick with a reason to let the President and Vice President go on committing more crimes.
The stated reason? Partisan political gain.
Here's what she said in July of 2007 about her reasoning:
"I made a decision a few years ago, or at least one year ago," said Pelosi in a recent interview, "that impeachment [of Bush] was something that we could not be successful with and that would take up the time we needed to do some positive things to establish a record of our priorities and their [Republican] short-comings.
"The President isn't worth it... he's not worth impeaching. We've got important work to do... If he were at the beginning of his term, people may think of it differently, but he's at the end of his terms. The first two years of his term, if we came in as the majority, there might be time to do it all..."
This illustrates that Pelosi's strategy from the beginning was to be soft on crime - to let the Bush administration off the hook as an election strategy. This also illustrates the wrongheadedness of Nancy Pelosi. This strategy is akin to a boxer dropping his guard and letting the opponent pummel him to a bloody pulp in order to obtain the sympathy of the crowd and the referee in a bid to get the opponent disqualified for viciousness and obtain points for toughness and tenacity.
Pelosi's election to her office was made possible by the voters who wanted something done about the Iraq war and the outrageous abuses of office of the president and vice president. Sadly, what they gave her was not enough for Nancy. She wants a bigger majority and she thinks the way to do it is to let the President and the Republicans run roughshod over the Congress.
There are other Democrats that want to act on these issues but Pelosi has stymied them at every turn. How low will she go? Pretty low.
The prospect of an impeachment inquiry by the House judiciary committee would concentrate the minds of the president and vice president wonderfully on obeying rather than sabotaging the Constitution. But Speaker Pelosi has at least figuratively joined hands with the White House in opposition... she has threatened the removal of Michigan Rep. John Conyers from his chairmanship of the House judiciary committee if an impeachment inquiry were even opened, according to reliable congressional chatter.
Pelosi went so far as to solicit evidence of impeachable offenses from the listeners of a radio program, the Ed Schultz Show on October 9, 2007:
"If somebody else out there has reason to think that they have evidence that the president has committed an impeachable offense that can pass the Congress please let me know that."
Perhaps she should ask some of the members of the House Judiciary Committee. Perhaps there's a failure to communicate, because several months before Pelosi's request a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, said this in a videotaped interview with Josh Marshall:
"The President admits that on forty-five different occasions he granted authorization for wiretapping without a FISA court warrant -- what I call warrantless wiretapping, outside the law. This is a felony. This is punishable by five years in jail. The President, the Attorney General, and anybody else -- there's a prima facie case they engaged in a criminal conspiracy. And in effect what they're saying is they have a right to classify, and thus hold themselves harmless, from a criminal conspiracy.
From my point of view, if the executive branch is contemptuous of the power of Congress, and is going to go above the law, and ignore the law, you have to use whatever weapons the Constitution gives Congress."
Hmmmm, I wonder what weapons the Constitution gives Congress... could it be... oh I don't know... maybe impeachment?
Ray McGovern, in an outstanding article published on Consortium News notes:
It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense.
Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee.
Hmmmm... it's an impeachable offense with a pedigree.
Here is the President's admission of guilt, still up on the White House website daring anybody to take notice of it:
Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations...The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days... I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks... The NSA's activities under this authorization are thoroughly reviewed by the Justice Department and NSA's top legal officials, including NSA's general counsel and inspector general. Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.
After providing evidence that the FISA violations committed by Bush preceded 9/11, Ray McGovern points out another disturbing possibility in the article I quoted above. What if Nancy Pelosi is soft on crime because she is complicit in one (or more) of the Bush administration's crimes?
We know that the Democrats briefed on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, D-Florida, and Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, respectively.
May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?
It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?
Are They All Complicit?
And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations—AT&T and Verizon—which made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution?
If Pelosi is complicit, perhaps the best thing that she could do for the Democratic Party and the nation is to step down from the speakership, admit her complicity in the Bush administration's crimes and offer to testify completely and truthfully everything that she knows about those crimes in exchange for immunity.
She'd probably get the immunity, but even if not, she probably won't face prosecution from the politicized Bush "Department of Justice," which is far too busy covering Bush administration's sorry criminal asses.
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