Should Congress impeach Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, or others?

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Note: The article below was written in the spring of 2006.  Since then, the situation has changed somewhat.  However, I prefer to leave this article posted as-is, as a reflection of how I saw the situation in 2006.  I am cnrrently working to advocate for issues (endorsement by everyone of A Minnesota Republican State Legislator's Contract with Voters).  Based on a conversation with the head of Minnesota's campaign financing regulating entity, I have decided not to endorse anyone for any office this year.  However, I reserve the right to reconsider this position at some future time, based on Constitutional arguments that I cannot be constrained from both advocating for issues, and endorsing candidates.  -- Bob Carney Jr.

The 2006 article follows:

After Watergate, the Minnesota Republican party renamed itself the Independent Republican party (IR), to distance itself from the national party.

My own view is that we are in a similar situation today.  A separate article considers how the Minnesota Republican party is becoming un-Republican. Below are some bullet points of how the national party has already (in my view) become almost hopelessly un-Republican.

* A Republican form of government is based on checks and balances.  By contract, the current "Republican" majorities in Congress have almost totally failed in oversight and deliberation.  The Medicare Drug bill is just one example: it wasn't even available to read until a few hours before the vote.

* A Republican form of government isn't owned, lock, stock and barrel by special interests.  At the national level, the Republican party is so totally dominated by special interest money that in my view it is very difficult for individual Republicans to act independently.

* The executive branch is being run with a level of secrecy that is both unprecedented, and clearly unconstitutional.  Congress has specific Constitutional oversight functions, among them the power of impeachment. The late Constitutional scholar Raoul Berger wrote a book called Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth, in which he traces the history of so-called privilege claims, and finds that, particularly in the early republic, it was widely accepted that Executive officers had a Constitutional obligation to provide Congress virtually unlimited access to any information Congress need to fulfill both legislative and oversight functions.

Here's what James Madison (Our fourth president) wrote in Federalist 47:

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The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.  Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with this accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system.

George W. Bush claimed in 2000 to be a uniter, not a divider.  That isn't the only one of his claims that hasn't worked out so well. By contrast,  James Madison really was a uniter, not a divider.  By the end of his second term of office, national partisan politics had essentially dissolved, and we entered a decade of non-partisanship that historians have called the "era of good feelings."  How was this done? 

In my assessment, a major contributing factor was that the Republicans at that time of Madison's administration were from what I call the Republican wing of the Republican party.  They believed that the different branches of government have specific roles and functions.  They believed it was important that government be carried out according to these different roles and functions, and with respect to the separation of powers.  They believed that Congress should be a deliberative body, and that people who serve in the Federal Government should be both capable and competent to exercise independent judgment, and at the same time dedicated to working cooperatively.  That's what the "era of Good Feelings," was all about. That's how to be a uniter, and not a divider.

How important was it to people from the Republican wing of the Republican party to have competent men with good independent judgment in the Cabinet?  James Madison is at one time on record as saying that if the President fired a member of his Cabinet who was qualified to do the job, that would be grounds for impeaching the president.  Madison didn't want "yes men" and "loyalists," he wanted the best people available for administering the Federal government.

The problem with Bush is the opposite: as long as you're "loyal," you won't be fired no matter how much damage you cause.

When the Republican party did split into factions in the 1820's both factions kept the name Republican as part of their name.  Later, the "Democratic Republicans" shortened their name to the Democrats.  The name Republican was, of course, reclaimed in the 1850's and became the party of Lincoln. 

I hope that some of our Federal Republican candidates are elected in the future... just not this year.

Why keep Ramstad in particular?  He's moderate, he has significant seniority, and he's on the Ways and Means Committee.

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