Pruning Shears

There’s been a lot of talk recently about impeachment, so this week I’m writing about executive power and the articles of impeachment for Vice President Cheney under H. Res 333.

From an executive overreach perspective Article I (2) states he “pressured the intelligence community to change their findings to enable the deception of the citizens and Congress of the United States”.  I’m going to assume at this point no one seriously argues the CIA wan’t pressured to put a dizzying spin on the intelligence or that the Vice President sponsored a separate shop in the Pentagon to produce some novel analysis that supported their desire to go to war.  The question for Pruning Shears is: Is this an egregious example of executive overreach, and if so does it merit impeachment?

For the first part of the question I say “yes”.  The most common reason I hear against it is the “poor babies” argument, which basically says that if the poor babies at the CIA were feeling pressured by the big bad veep they should have resigned in protest and gone public.  Unfortunately that doesn’t take into account the fairly extraordinary amount of courage it takes to be a whistleblower.  Even people assured of career options afterward are very reluctant to do so at the time (Richard Carmona, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, the list goes on).  Imagine being a faceless bureaucrat looking at taking on an entire administration as well as a job search with an unpleasant departure as the last line on your résumé.  Most people won’t do so for obvious reasons - explain THAT to the Mrs. - and we certainly shouldn’t postulate the health of the republic on it.  Mr. Cheney used his authority as an implicit threat to the livelihood of those under him, and that ought to be considered an unacceptable abuse of power.

Ah, but those analysts are in the executive branch and may be let go if they don’t fall into line; imagine the chaos if everyone could follow their own agendas!  Let me say first off that I yield to no man as a more enthusiastic promoter of the president’s pleasure.  Still, there are limits.  From a practical standpoint we shouldn’t allow presidents to hire and fire on a whim.  Give it a try if you want to see what real chaos looks like.  Second, framing the executive’s options as godlike or Gullivered presents the extremes as the only choices.  There’s an enormous amount of ground between where we can respect the authority of the executive to have final say on employment while still expecting its agencies to do smart, considered, factual and independent work.  That territory has been redacted from the map and it’s time to redraw it.

What’s an appropriate sanction for this?  One approach is to say there’s no need for sanction at all, just let it go.  Cheney is an enormously skilled politician and he knows where the levers of power are (and how to use them).  Politics ain’t beanbag kid and if you can’t take a game of hardball then join the whiffleball team.  In practice this means anything that isn’t explicitly illegal is fine; go after your opponents by switching rules, practices, standards, conventions, procedures and everything else not spelled out in a law.  And even if it is spelled out you’re still be OK if you can find a law somewhere that might contradict it in some way or a legal precedent that might at least partially cover it.  I call this “muffin top legalism.”  There are two downsides to this approach, the first being that over time it tends to make laws meaningless as we go from legal code to spaghetti code.  The second is that it’s only really fun to do when your folks are in power.  As soon as you’re on the outside looking in it becomes, well, kind of a drag.  Either way the only scenario that makes this approach a long-term benefit is if you plan to live in a one party state.

If you think there should be some sanction, what makes sense?  The administration doesn’t appear to care about public opinion, either as expressed through polls or our most recent election results.  Censure is meaningless if you are contemptuous of those expressing it.  The main argument I’ve heard against impeachment is that it would gum up the works in Congress and prevent real work from getting done.  I’d say that in the midst of a constitutional crisis the most important work is that crisis itself.  And we may find that many of the other urgent issues facing us become much more manageable once this one is taken care of.  If you believe in the form of government as set out in our founding documents then it’s increasingly clear that the radical position is not favoring impeachment but opposing it.