[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 106 (Thursday, June 28, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H7413-H7414]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            VICE PRESIDENT SHOULD RESIGN OR FACE IMPEACHMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, it is time for a new exit strategy, one 
that removes the Vice President of the United States from office, 
voluntarily, if he chooses, but by impeachment if he stonewalls.
  The time has come for the Vice President to go. Our Nation and our 
national security interests at home and abroad cannot afford to have 
this Vice President one heartbeat away from the Presidency. As it 
stands now, the Vice President's damage to U.S. interests, security, 
system of government and our position at home and abroad will take 
years to overcome.
  As my constituents in the State of Washington's Seventh Congressional 
District know, I have struggled mightily with this matter for a long 
time. In grave matters facing our Nation, I believe conscience and a 
deep respect for our system of government should guide our actions and 
words.
  I didn't hesitate to speak the truth to power before the invasion of 
Iraq, despite the bitter partisan acts that I knew would follow. I have 
no doubt that I will be targeted for a new round of shelling after 
these remarks.
  The intent of this administration and this Vice President has been to 
silence all dissent, and it always happens the same way; relentless 
attacks until people ask themselves, do I want to subject myself to 
that kind of hell if I speak out? Fear is what kept this administration 
in office in 2004, and fear is the only public discourse this 
administration understands and practices. Why debate, when you can 
dictate? Why follow the law, when you can act like you are above the 
law?
  For months, I believed that impeachment was a dire course of action. 
Over these same months, I have seen the haven't repeatedly drive our 
Nation into increasingly dire situations in Iraq, Iran and within our 
country as he tramples on the Constitution like it was a doormat.
  For months I have considered if America would best be served by 
bringing forth articles of impeachment against the Vice President. I 
kept asking myself, is the Vice President's conduct that dire, because 
impeachment is the closest thing there is to internment on political 
death row.
  The Founders intended impeachment to be used when those running the 
government forgot that they worked for the people, and the Founders 
intended impeachment to be used when toughs running the government 
acted as though they were above the law.
  When you look at the record, you have to conclude that the Vice 
President has placed himself above the law. He holds himself 
accountable only to special interests, who meet with him in secret with 
no record kept of who was there, what was discussed or what promises 
the Vice President made.
  For the last 4 years, the Vice President has refused to allow routine 
office inspections by a Federal agency regarding the safe handling of 
America's secrets. The Vice President defies the Information Security 
Oversight Agency, claiming he is not part of the executive branch of 
government. When a sitting Vice President claims that he is not part of 
the executive branch of government to which he was elected, it is time 
to remove him.
  The Vice President holds himself accountable to no one. He ordered 
the Secret Service to destroy visitors logs, and we have learned in the 
Washington Post recently, that the Vice President circumvented every 
check and balance inside the White House to force through his own 
agenda, to spy on Americans through illegal wire traps, creating the 
gulag at Guantanamo, and subverting civil liberties and free speech at 
every turn.
  Since the President permits the flagrant disregard of the 
Constitution, it is up to the Congress to act and defend the American 
people. With each new revelation, America has seen only glints of what 
has been done totally in secret.
  For all we don't know, this much we do know: The Vice President holds 
himself above the law, and it is time for the Congress to enforce the 
law. I believe the evidence is overwhelming and the articles of 
impeachment against the Vice President should be drawn up.
  The Vice President likes to say the military option is on the table. 
Tonight it is time to say the impeachment option is on the table.
  I am adding my name to H.R. 333, calling for the impeachment. For the 
good of the Nation, the Vice President should leave office immediately. 
Call it a medical condition, call it a political condition, call it 
what it is; the departure of a person who forgot that he works for the 
American people.
  The Vice President must either resign or face impeachment.
  Madam Speaker, I submit for the Record an article in Slate magazine 
dated 27 June 2004, entitled ``Impeach Cheney.''

                    [From Slate.com, June 27, 2007]

  Impeach Cheney--The Vice President Has Run Utterly Amok and Must Be 
                                Stopped

                            (By Bruce Fein)

       Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has 
     been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented 
     giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, 
     Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted 
     theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have 
     embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we 
     know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive 
     order governing the handling of classified information in the 
     executive branch does not reach his office because he also 
     serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice 
     president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing 
     above and beyond the Constitution. The House Judiciary 
     Committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As 
     Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an 
     impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. 
     Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly 
     qualify.
       Take the vice president's preposterous theory that his 
     office is outside the executive branch because it also 
     exercises a legislative function. The same can be said of the 
     president, who also exercises a legislative function in 
     signing or vetoing bills passed by Congress. Under Cheney's 
     bizarre reasoning, President Bush is not part of his own 
     administration: The executive branch becomes acephalous. 
     Today Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington refused to 
     renounce that reasoning, instead laughably trying to diminish 
     the importance of the legal question at issue.
       The nation's first vice president, John Adams, bemoaned: 
     ``My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most 
     insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived 
     or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good 
     nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet common 
     fate.'' Vice President John Nance Garner, serving under 
     President Franklin D. Roosevelt, lamented: ``The vice 
     presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm * * *.'' In modern 
     times, vice presidents have generally been confined to 
     attending state funerals or to distributing blankets after 
     earthquakes.
       Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion's share 
     of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney 
     has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that 
     all checks and balances and individual liberties are 
     subservient to the president's commander in chief powers in 
     confronting international terrorism. Let's review the record 
     of his abuses and excesses:
       The vice president asserted presidential power to create 
     military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, 
     jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme 
     Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney 
     claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy 
     combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's 
     say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King 
     Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the 
     storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney 
     in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
       The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret 
     detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of 
     suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been 
     answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against 
     CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney 
     would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin 
     to kidnap American tourists in

[[Page H7414]]

     Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they 
     were suspected of Chechen sympathies.
       The vice president has maintained that the entire world is 
     a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power 
     may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on 
     American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with 
     al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to 
     kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when 
     he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's 
     then-suspected ties to international terrorism.
       Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture 
     in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.
       He has advocated and authored signing statements that 
     declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of 
     bills he has signed into law that he proclaims are 
     unconstitutional, for example, a requirement to obtain a 
     judicial warrant before opening mail or a prohibition on 
     employing military force to fight narco-terrorists in 
     Colombia. The signing statements are tantamount to absolute 
     line-item vetoes that the Supreme Court invalidated in the 
     1998 case Clinton v. New York.
       The vice president engineered the National Security 
     Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program targeting 
     American citizens on American soil in contravention of the 
     Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. He concocted 
     the alarming theory that the president may flout any law that 
     inhibits the collection of foreign intelligence, including 
     prohibitions on breaking and entering homes, torture, or 
     assassinations. As a reflection of his power in this arena, 
     today the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Cheney's 
     office, as well as the White House, for documents that relate 
     to the warrantless eavesdropping.
       The vice president has orchestrated the invocation of 
     executive privilege to conceal from Congress secret spying 
     programs to gather foreign intelligence, and their legal 
     justifications. He has summoned the privilege to refuse to 
     disclose his consulting of business executives in conjunction 
     with his Energy Task Force, and to frustrate the testimonies 
     of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers regarding the firings of U.S. 
     attorneys.
       Cheney scorns freedom of speech and of the press. He urges 
     application of the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists who 
     expose national security abuses, for example, secret prisons 
     in Eastern Europe or the NSA's warrantless surveillance 
     program. He retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and 
     his wife, Valerie Plame, through Chief of Staff Scooter 
     Libby, for questioning the administration's evidence of 
     weapons of mass destruction as justification for invading 
     Iraq. Mr. Cheney is defending himself from a pending suit 
     brought by Wilson and Plame on the grounds that he is 
     entitled to the absolute immunity of the president 
     established in 1982 by Nixon v. Fitzgerald. (Although this 
     defense contradicts Cheney's claim that he is not part of the 
     executive branch.)
       The Constitution does not expressly forbid the president 
     from abandoning his chief powers to the vice president. But 
     President Bush's tacit delegation to Cheney and Cheney's 
     eager acceptance tortures the Constitution's provision for an 
     acting president. The presidency and vice presidency are 
     discrete constitutional offices. The 12th Amendment provides 
     for their separate elections. The sole constitutionally 
     enumerated function of the vice president is to serve as 
     president of the Senate without a vote except to break ties.
       In contrast, Article II enumerates the powers and 
     responsibilities of the president, including the obligation 
     to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A special 
     presidential oath is prescribed. Section 3 of the 25th 
     Amendment provides a method for the president to yield his 
     office to the vice president, when ``he is unable to 
     discharge the powers and duties of his office.'' There is no 
     other constitutional provision for transferring presidential 
     powers to the vice president.
       Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, 
     President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice 
     President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 
     25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that 
     the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of 
     the presidency and who should be held responsible for 
     successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs 
     political accountability by continually hiding the real 
     decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post 
     has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a 
     four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.
       In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain 
     or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is 
     because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in 
     the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for 
     his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the 
     Constitution and the rule of law.

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