Lewis Lapham on Impeachment

Lewis Lapham on impeachment:
Daily Kos:

In the January 2007 Harper’s, former editor Lewis Lapham takes aim at Nancy Pelosi’s "impeachment is off the table." Nor does he like Robert Reich's "it would be far better if Democrats used their newfound power to lay out a new agenda for America. There’s no point digging up more dirt."

Instead, Lapham argues:

Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over of as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or a subpoena. We can’t "lay out a new agenda for America" unless we know which America we’re talking about, the one that embodies the freedoms of a sovereign people or the one made to fit the requirements of a totalitarian state....

Like it or not, and no matter how unpleasant or impolitic the proceedings, the spirit of the law doesn’t allow the luxury of fastidious silence or discreet abstention....

The Constitution doesn’t serve at the pleasure of Representative Pelosi any more than it answers to the whim of President Bush, and by taking "off the table" the mess of an impeachment proceeding, the lady from California joins the president in his distaste for such an unclean thing as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Rightly understood, democracy is an uproar, the argument meant to be blunt, vigilant, and fierce, not, as the purveyors of our respectable opinion would have it, a matter of liveried civil servants passing one another polite synonyms on silver trays."

Lapham describes the Bush Administration as "a predatory government...stealing from a free but inattentive people their lives, liberties, fortunes, good name, and sacred honor." He lists the evidence warranting impeachment:

1. A foreign war conceived as a means of advancing the Bush Administration’s imposition on the American people of a not-so-benevolent despotism, the army sent to fight and die not for the defense of country but for a corporate cream of commercial empire.


2. A government that tortures people classified as enemy combatants, denies their right to hear all the evidence bearing on their confinement and arrest, forbids their resort to petitions of habeas corpus.


3. The administration’s systematic plundering of the Federal Treasury on behalf of its accomplices in the arms and construction trades.


4. The National Security Agency directed to monitor, without first obtaining a court order, any and al telephone and email traffic suspected of carrying the germs of terrorism.


5. The president’s use of 136 signing statements since he took office to exempt himself from the rule of more than 1,000 federal laws.

Finally, Lapham asks:

How much longer do we wish to pretend that nothing really happened, or that nothing really valuable is lost; that the crime is the losing of the Iraq war, not the making of it? That in place of the constitutional questions asking why, to what end, and whose interest, we can afford to substitute the questions of logistics – how many troops to dispatch or withdraw over a period of how many days or months...
what deals to cut with Syria and Iran.

In Lapham’s view, impeaching Bush will be a form of public education, a civic lesson that might "unearth American democracy."

Daily Kos UPDATE: People have asked for a link, but the January Harper's is not yet online, only December.

Related:

• Ten Reasons to Impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney

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