Bernard Weiner: The Veep claims he's got immunity from any lawsuit--whaaaat?
In foreign policy, the CheneyBush Administration is criticized widely
abroad for acting like an arrogant bully, threatening and often meting
out rough treatment to get what it wants. Its violent behavior in Iraq
is a good case in point, leading to tens of thousands of U.S. dead and
wounded and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed.
But it's not just in foreign matters that such outrageous, in-your-face
behavior obtains. And the best example of this can be found in two
separate, but interrelated, cases that came into view this past week.
The one with the most political and constitutional significance involves
Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Scooter Libby -- and by extension the
POTUS Himself -- asserting for the first time in public, through their
attorneys, that they are immune from prosecution because they are above
the law.
Libby recently was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in
the Plame criminal case. He and Cheney and Rove are being civilly sued
by Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame for their having outed her
as a covert CIA agent and thus endangering her (and her contacts) and
ruining her career. The response by the defense legal team to the judge
hearing the case, as reported by the
Washington Post:
"The lawyers said any conversations Cheney and the officials had about Plame with one another or with reporters were part of their normal duties because they were discussing foreign policy and engaging in an appropriate 'policy dispute.' Cheney's attorney went further, arguing that Cheney is legally akin to the president because of his unique government role and has absolute immunity from any lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates wanted to make sure he heard them claim what he thought he heard them claim, so he explicitly inquired: "So you're arguing there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- these officials could have said to reporters that would have been beyond the scope of their employment," whether the statements were true or false?
That's true, Your Honor...," said Jeffrey S. Bucholtz, deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil division.
Richard Nixon had asserted much the same claim of
absolute authority about his actions in the Watergate scandal, that when
the President does something, it's ipso facto not illegal, and
can't be
illegal, since he's the President. The U.S. Supreme Court at
that time made clear that nobody, not the President and not his
associates and aides, are outside the reach of the law. In addition, a
conservative-led federal appeals court years later ruled that President
Bill Clinton could be civilly sued by Paula Jones while he was in
office.
But in 2007, there's a new, more "conservative" Supreme Court, which may
explain why the CheneyBushRove forces are pushing the issue of absolute
presidential authority to the point of a Constitutional Crisis. They
figure with Roberts and Alito on the court, they should be able to get a
5-4 decision granting the "commander-in-chief" carte blanche in
"wartime."
What war, you ask? Why the Bush-proclaimed permanent "Global War on
Terror," that's what war. Since that war is one being waged against a
tactic, it'll never end and Bush is thus free to do whatever he wishes
to do for the duration of his term.