Ex-Reagan Associate Deputy Attorney General: Impeach Cheney

Josh Catone
Raw Story
Friday June 28, 2007

Bruce Fein, who served as the Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, in a scathing editorial today called for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III," he writes.

This is not the first time that Fein has taken on the Bush administration. In March 2006, Fein appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on Senate Resolution 398, which called for the censure of George Bush over the warrantless wiretap program.

Fein said in his 2006 testimony that by authorizing the domestic spying program, President Bush sought to "cripple the Constitution’s checks and balances and political accountability."

In October 2006, Fein ripped into Bush for his "alarming usurpations of legislative prerogatives," and into the then-Republican controlled Congress for sitting idly by and "placing party loyalty above institutional loyalty, contrary to the expectations of the Founding Fathers."

With the wiretap program back in the news following this week's congressional subpoenas of the White House and the office of the Vice President, and a subsequent refusal to cooperate, Fein unleashed his highly critical philippic.

Fein details "multiple crimes against the Constitution" committed by Cheney, including the creation of military commissions, the "kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists," the advocation of "signing statements" to ignore pieces of legislation, and the encouragement of the use of torture.

"The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield," writes Fein, saying the vice president has used the bugaboo of terrorism to justify a shoot first, ask questions later approach to dealing with suspected terrorists, even when that includes American citizens.

Fein also touches on the hot-button warrantless wiretapping program, over which he has butted heads with the administration in the past. He argues that Cheney engineered the program and has "orchestrated the invocation of executive privilege" to conceal information about it from Congress.

In the end, Fein makes the case that "Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney," in violation of the US Constitution.

"President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president," he concludes. "Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law."