John Conyers, the House Judiciary Committee's chairman and irrepressible swordsman, announced earlier this week that he'll hold a hearing on the presidential power of clemency, which, given the reigning scofflaw who possesses that power, means a hearing on its abuse.
Said Rep. Conyers' statement: "In light of Monday's announcement by the president that he was commuting the prison sentence for Scooter Libby, it is imperative that Congress look into presidential authority to grant clemency, and how such power may be abused. Taken to its extreme, the use of such authority could completely circumvent the law enforcement process and prevent credible efforts to investigate wrongdoing in the executive branch."
Right-wing bloviation merchants and the mainstream media (if they're not still obsessing over John Edwards' haircuts) will, of course, snicker and ridicule. They'll trumpet the president's right to grant clemency as constitutionally absolute, they'll belittle those who question its limits as basement-blogging bombthrowers, and they'll altogether ignore Rep. Conyers' proper allusions to improper extremes, unreasonable circumventions and potential obstructions of justice.
If pressed, they'll deride the notion that a president's exercise of a constitutional right could conceivably fit the impeachable bill of high crimes and misdemeanors. On the face of it, they'll say, the notion is absurd, since no crime could possibly attach to a constitutional right.
In brief, they'll attempt to short-circuit any serious analysis of that which would foreshadow any serious evaluation of impeachable behavior.
They'll declare the debate settled before it begins.
But there's something else they'll be wilfully ignoring. And the something else is that we've been down this interpretational road before -- and that road ended with another House Judiciary chairman confronting conventional thinking, and arriving at a quite different and ultimately determinate conclusion.
In the spasmodic unraveling of Dick Nixon's final year in office, Chairman Peter Rodino once snapped to dubious reporters, "To me, 'high crimes and misdemeanors' were never precise. The way I read them, they aren't meant to spell out anything but a president's performance in office.
"I see it as the kind of conduct that brings the whole office into scandal and disrepute, the kind of abuse of power that subverts the system we live in, that brings about in and of itself a loss of confidence in this system.
"I guess, all in all, it's behavior which in its totality is not good for the presidency, nor any part of the system."
The White House, much of the press and, naturally, herds of contemporary right-wing bloviators initially tried laughing off that argument. A high crime or misdemeanor means a high crime or a misdemeanor -- period -- they snorted, in response to which Chairman Rodino's committee then drafted a boatload of impeachment articles, which, as journalist Teddy White broadly characterized them shortly after, embodied the outrage that "Richard Nixon through his men and his administration had frustrated the operation of justice against wrongdoers and abused the power of state against a number of free citizens, and thus, against all citizens."
Chairman Rodino's committee also issued this general finding: "Unlike a criminal case, the cause for the removal of a President may be based on his entire course of conduct in office."
Whereupon the White House, the press and the bloviators stopped laughing.
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