Greater Hartford Impeach Update: 1/19/08

Congressman John Larson called me today to set up a meeting Friday on the 12 questions I presented him with just before Thanksgiving. Three astute local journalists picked up our sad story, and Larson was compelled to respond. Kevin Lamkins, who is on this email list, aired a half-hour interview with me on WWUH, the University of Hartford radio station, and followed it up with an on-line item in Undercurrents, a blog run by the Hartford Independent Media Center (where my essays are published regularly). A few days later Steve Collins, who had seen Undercurrents, interviewed me for a story in the Bristol Press. Yesterday, the Hartford Courant published a sympathetic piece by Rick Green, a columnist I've know for many years who's also on this email list and who reads everything. The Courant column must have shaken something loose, because the congressman apologized for the "mix-up" that's kept us apart these many weeks, and we're on for next week.

My congressman doesn't have a lot of options in this meeting. Our questions ask about nine specific classes of criminal conduct on the part of the president (and it's not a complete list of offenses), including torture, obstruction of justice, kidnaping, perjury, lying to Congress, and waging war on a pretext, most of them amply documented in the public record. The remaining three questions ask about the constitutional responsibility of a member of Congress when the president has committed crimes. My plan is simply to read the questions and ask the congressman to think about them and answer after giving them due consideration. There is no principled response Larson can give to these questions other than a concession that his constitutional duty is to support the commencement of impeachment hearings.

John Larson bases his refusal to support impeachment on a prediction about how it will turn out. Impeachment is nothing more than accusation, and Larson worries that the accusations won't be sustained in the Senate, where they would be tried. If he believes that any of the accusations have merit, he's not in a position to make such predictions. He and his colleagues are the sole law-enforcement officers over crimes committed by the president and vice-president, and the criminals can't be brought to account by any other official. If Larson believes crimes have been committed, he is obliged to act, regardless of prognostications about how senators might react.

Larson must also concede that Congress' failure to act will set a precedent. Some future congress will cite some future president for criminal conduct, and that president will be able to point to this congress for the proposition that presidents are above the law. Our 12th question asks Larson whether he worries that people will interpret Congress' failure to hold this president accountable as a deliberate effort to place the president above the law. He might answer that one in the negative, but he must know history will judge him harshly if he shirks this fundamental responsibility.

Link to website: Connecticut Accountability Project