Hagel Jumps Shark
Chucky "Janus" Hagel, one of my very least favorite politicians in any party, decided that yesterday's talking head circuit was the best place to showcase his cluelessness and faulty understanding of the US Constitution. He started huffing and puffing about impeaching the president over policy differences on the Iraq war. Ed Morrisey cheerfully hands Chucky his head.
Only Senators completely ignorant of the Constitution would consider impeachment a viable option for dealing with policy differences between the executive and the legislature. The Constitution, in Article 2, Section 4, makes very plain the bases on which Congress can move to impeach a President:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
It does not grant Congress the right to remove a President on policy grounds. In fact, the entire idea of the balance of powers is to ensure that policy differences get worked out by compromise and that Congress does not act out of a mob mentality. The founders made the branches co-equal for a reason, and that was to limit the power of both. Otherwise, they would have chosen the parliamentary model — they had the British system as an easy example to follow — and made Congress the arbiter of executive policy.
The folks betting against America are going too far. There will be a backlash - soon, I think. Hagel has backed the wrong horse and is digging himself a deeper hole every time he opens his mouth lately. He has effectively eliminated himself from consideration for the Republican nomination with his antics. Frankly, I don't think he's endearing himself to moderates either - people see through opportunism (see earlier post on Gorezilla). So if he is, as I suspect, trying to line up for an independent run, he's already toasted himself before he's even started.
Other Links to this Post
-
Flopping Aces — March 26, 2007 @ 12:47 pm
-
Can’t we just vote Hagel off the island? : The Crimson Blog — March 26, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
By jpg, March 26, 2007 @ 2:29 pm
Sigh. Just when I think Hagel can’t embarrass us Nebraskans anymore, he does. What a maroon. JPG
By TimF, March 26, 2007 @ 3:33 pm
To paraphrase Churchill, if “Success is the ability to go from one ignorance to another with no loss of enthusiasm” then Sen. Chucky may be the most successful man in the world.