I just posted this at Sen. Wyden’s blog and thought I should cross post here because this is something that every Oregonian of any political leaning should be able to get behind: the idea that the presidential power does not extend to elevating someone beyond the reach of the law.

I think the moment for impeachment has passed; it should have been done long ago, but the Democrats sat on their hands.

Now, the issue is not impeachment, but preserving evidence and making preparations for war crimes trials against the Bush junta.  Americans should read the words of Justice Jackson at Nuremburg.

One thing that I hope Senator Wyden will ask CRO to look into is the Constitutional validity of a blanket pardon, such as Ford gave Nixon.  I’ve always been troubled by that; I object to the whole notion of a pardon for unspecified, uncharged crimes, and I don’t think it comports with what the Founders meant when they gave the President the power to pardon.  I think Scalia would have to agree that the pardon power was used to pardon people who had been convicted of crimes, not to make people immune to all legal process.

With this bunch, you can expect Bush to issue huge numbers of general pardons in hopes of preventing any investigations into the many, many crimes against humanity and against the laws of war that this pack of gangsters have committed.

We need, now, a sense of the Congress resolution that

(a) No pardon is effective for unspecified acts or where the person has not been charged and convicted of the crime being pardoned.

(b) That is, constitutionally, any person may be indicted, tried, and convicted for any crimes they may have committed, notwithstanding any preemptive pardons.

If we have a government of laws and not men, then there is no room in the constitutional system for a lame-duck president to issue blanket pardons to his gangsters.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 8:36 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.