January 18, 2006
Some Say Potatoes
By William
F. Buckley
Insiders passed on
the word that former Vice President Al Gore would not go so far
as actually to call for the impeachment of George Bush, and indeed
he did not. The crowd at the Daughters of the American Revolution
Constitution Hall was disappointed. But it was left with a great
deal to chew on.
Mr. Gore all but gave
the impression that impeachment itself is simply a constitutional
formality, necessarily ensuing upon such behavior as the president
is clearly guilty of. Congress, said Gore, should hold hearings
into "serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part
of the president, and they should follow the evidence wherever
it leads." Yes, the chief executive has inherent powers to
act in national crises, but the president has crossed the line
into criminal acts, "breaking the law repeatedly and persistently,"
bringing "our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach
in the fabric of our Constitution."
Well, is he or is
he not? We have heard, coming from the lips of one of the senior
Democrats in the land, the direct charge that the president may
be engaging in criminal behavior.
How is the uncommitted
voter to react? Those who are sophisticated in weighing the questions
at hand know that it is not easy to objectify the limits of executive
power, and Mr. Bush has pretty well settled for telling us that
the measures he has undertaken fall within his competence "to
use all necessary and appropriate force against those ... persons"
he believes might have been, or might in the future be, engaged
in terrorist aggression. Not easy to prove, abuse, yet some abuse
is inevitable given what the National Security Agency and the
FBI have been asked to do. That is, to examine conversations and
written exchanges which, compositely, could transmute into a powder-keg
airplane heading at top speed into the Capitol.
Mr. Gore is appealing
to voters who are prepared to believe that abuse is written into
President Bush's interpretation of his authority, and that that
would be revealed if an investigation got to the bottom of what
is now going on.
Those who want an
answer to the question, Is Mr. Bush exceeding his authority? are
not easily satisfied. It was decided at the launch of the republic
that the Supreme Court was not available to give "advisory
judgments." The court is not going to intervene in executive
and legislative life to deal with hypothetical complaints. To
engage the attention of the court, you have to address it as a
plaintiff, charging constitutionally prohibited activity.
The political meaning
of this is that at this moment, the curious and apprehensive voter
can't be guided in any conclusive way. There are two difficulties.
The first is that the data needed to pass sound judgments aren't
available. Nobody is going to tell the president that he has to
hand over a list of the people whose telephone conversations he
has intercepted, with the reasons why those interceptions were
undertaken. A second difficulty is that it is inconceivable that
an investigative panel would agree that the investigation of,
say, Ramad el-Sein was not only preposterous, but revealing of
malefaction by those who undertook to tap his phone.
This means that Gore's
charge that allegations of criminal conduct by the president are
"serious" cannot be substantiated. All that can be done
is to debate, as we have been doing for about 200 years, the proper
reach of executive power. Two lawsuits have been filed that are
nothing more than showboat legal feints, the kind of thing the
American Civil Liberties Union, which is a party in one of the
lawsuits, was born to do. What isn't going to happen is anything
that can be taken as a dispositive finding, constitutional or
moral, on the questions raised by Mr. Gore in his talk to an assembly
of frustrated American dissidents.
Al Gore was active,
seven years ago, in defending President Bill Clinton, who actually
was impeached. He stressed in those days the integrity of the
Constitution and the need to treat soberly the powers of the president,
and the derivative respect owed to those powers by the legislature.
Mr. Gore's speeches during that period are relevant reading today.
Copyright
2006 Universal Press Syndicate
