Rep. Darrell Issa, the laughingstock California pol in line to assume chair of the House Oversight Committee if Republicans win control of the House in the fall, has repeatedly compared the Sestak offer to Watergate, which is to say impeachment.
Fox News is giving the Obama impeachment the same wall-to-wall coverage it gave to promoting the tea bagger mob rallies last summer — in part to divert attention from the Gulf oil disaster, which is a result of the policies of the Bush-Cheney administration and the Republican Party, which the network serves:
- On Sean Hannity’s Fox show, Dick Morris, the disgraced political operative who is the network’s official resident Clinton-hater and thus its impeachment expert, adjudicated the matter:
DICK MORRIS: Being on the intelligence advisory board, yes. That’s important … And I’m not — and if that offer were conveyed, I think that that would be, in my judgment, grounds for impeachment.”
- On Fox News, legal expert Judge Andrew Napolitano says the offer was impeachable:
NAPOLITANO: It is illegal. I mean, if that’s the conversation, this is going to — if Congressman Sestak can be compelled to speak, and I can tell you how that will happen if you want to hear it, it will be his version of what happened versus the other person in the conversation’s version. If it was — are you interested in a job in the administration? End of conversation. Not a crime. If it was a quid pro quo, as you suggested — are you interested in a high-ranking job in the administration if you leave Arlen Specter alone? That is an attempted bribe. If more than one person was involved on the offering end, it’s conspiracy to bribe. It’s interference. It’s attempted interference with a federal election, and if more than one person was involved on the offering end, it’s conspiracy to — to affect the outcome of an election by an impermissible means. Each one of those carries five years in federal prison.
- Fox’s Gretchen Carlson asked Rep. Darrell Issa for his take:
Gretchen Carlson hosted Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to discuss his request for a “special counsel to investigate” the allegations. Issa compared the situation to “Watergate” and said that “there’s been an allegation of what could be up to three felonies.” Carlson also asked whether the allegations, if true, amounted to “an impeachable offense,” and Issa replied, “I think it was Dick Morris who said that, and you know, you can only impeach the president. You can’t impeach his staff. So the real question is: Was this a staff decision? Did Rahm Emanuel do this on his own? Until we know who made the offer, we really don’t know.”
On the other hand, here’s Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing, pro-corporate think tank:
If what the Obama administration did was impeachable, then Rep. Issa might want to consider retroactive impeachment action against Ronald Reagan, whose White House directly suggested to S.I. Hayakawa that he would get an administration position if he would stay out of the Republican primary for Senate in California; or call for an investigation and special prosecutor of the Bush White House for discussing a Cabinet post with Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska to clear the field for their preferred Republican candidate Mike Johanns in 2006. At the same time, Issa might want to call for expulsion of his Senate colleague Judd Gregg, who insisted before he accepted the post of Commerce Secretary in the Obama administration that there be a guarantee that his successor, appointed by a Democratic governor, be a Republican.
That opposition lawmakers would talk about special prosecutors and impeachment is not surprising; that too has become almost routine in recent years. But I would hope that veteran reporters and editors would at least put these stories into context. To be sure, the Obama White House mishandled the story by refusing to comment for a long time—as one keen observer said, “Don’t look guilty when you are innocent.” But it tells us a lot about the nature of contemporary journalism that a non-story gets prominent and uncritical attention without any attempt to put it in its proper place.
Here’s how the AP described the Reagan’s “bribe” attempt in article from Nov. 26, 1981 — a year out from the 1982 midterm elections:
Sen. S.I. Hayakawa on Wednesday spurned a Reagan administration suggestion that if he drops out of the crowded Republican Senate primary race in California, President Reagan would find him a job.
“I’m not interested,” said the 75-year-old Hayakawa. “I do not want to be an ambassador, and I do not want an administration post.”
…In an interview earlier this week, Ed Rollins, who will become the president’s chief political adviser in January, said Hayakawa would be offered an administration post if he decided not to seek re-election.
It happens that it is legal to impeach an official after he or she has left office (as the lawyers for Cheney and Bush surely know). In fact, there is precedent for impeachment of an official who is no longer in office:
In 1876, Secretary of War General William Belknap [who served in the scandal-plagued Republican administration of Pres. Ulysses Grant], accused of accepting a bribe, resigned just hours before the House was scheduled to consider articles of impeachment. The House went ahead and unanimously impeached him, and by a vote of 37-29 the Senate rejected the argument that Belknap’s resignation should abort the case. The Senate proceeded with the trial, but Belknap was narrowly acquitted. A number of the Senators who voted for acquittal explained that they felt they lacked jurisdiction because of his resignation.
Ed Rollins, the Reagan operative who brokered the “bribe” to Sen. Hayakawa, is still very much alive and would be available to be subpoenaed and put under oath.
If Pres. Clinton can be impeached for a sex lie in a civil lawsuit depostion, and Obama can be impeached over political horse-trading, then Pres. Reagan needs to be censured, too, even if he is dead — after which we can address George W. Bush’s obstruction of justice in the betrayal of national security in the Plame case and, what the heck, Bush’s father’s lie that he was “out of the loop” on Reagan’s horse trading with the Iranian terror state in his arms for hostages deal.
It’s not gonna happen. Issa will never go after any of the republican presidents who did the same thing. I’m very familiar with republican hypocrisy.