Recently, I ran across Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal editorial
A Separate Peace. Though it was published in 2005, I think the years since have only strengthened the evidence supporting her assertion:
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon.
As has become obvious in the past years, the
Unitary Executive theory endorsed by President Bush differs little from the reality of Rome's
Principate. The Republic is under assault from within. Although the Democrats in Congress are now trying to assert Congressional prerogatives, particularly in the
US Attorneys scandal [AP], it may well be too little too late.
The White House defiantly stuck by Gonzales on the perjury matter and flatly denied that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller on Thursday contradicted the attorney general's sworn testimony on internal Bush administration dissent over the president's secretive wiretapping program.
This administration has such contempt for Congress, that they order their people to ignore Congressional subpoenas and laugh off obvious prevarication and perjury committed by their officers in front of Congressional committees.
Most telling is this final paragraph from the AP story I cited above:
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee approved a contempt citation against two other Bush confidants, Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers. The full House is expected to vote on the citation in the fall, but the Justice Department has said it won't prosecute the two.
The system is broken, so much so that Congress is considering adding
inherent contempt back into its arsenal for the first time since the Great Depression.
[I note that Wikipedia's article on
Contempt of Congress is listed as "unverifiable" since it "does not cite any references or sources". This, of course, is balderdash, as the article's primary source is
Congress's Contempt Power: Law, History, Practice, and Procedure, a PDF written by the
Congressional Research Service for the use of Congress that runs 65 pages with no less than 402 footnotes.
It seems pretty well cited to me.]
Our system has been battered before. Take a look at the Grant administration, or those of Harding or Nixon. Look at the Civil War, the Depression, or Vietnam/Watergate. Look at slavery and segregation. And on the cultural and civility front, we're miles ahead of the Andrew Jackson era. It's been simply
decades since anybody was stabbed in the US Senate Chamber. You want yellow journalism? FOX is
nothing next to the newspapers for which that phrase was coined in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War.
Somehow, we always bounced back. Somewhere, we always believed that the system could be fixed, and if we couldn't fix it there were men and women in our Constitutional Republic who could and would.
Yet, the feeling in much of the country this time seems to be - not so much. Why?
(... and therefore I believe the President and Vice President of the United States must be impeached.)