Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) calls for the formation of a Congressional committee that would look into executive encroachments on the Constitution and the legislature, a committee that would be bipartisan and analyze past actions that have led to increased presidential power. (0:44)
Bruce Fein says Congress has surrendered to the increased power of the president by being unresponsive to decisions made by President Bush. (0:51)
Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) says it is not debatable that President Bush has ordered officials in the administration not to testify to Congress, saying this abuse of executive privilege meets the Constitutional standard for impeachment. (1:14)
Jeremy Rabkin from the U.S. Institute of Peace says that if people believe that the president “knowingly, deliberately” got the country into war for reasons completely unrelated to national security, then “of course the action would be impeachable.” However, Rabkin says that nobody has tried to explain the “conspiracy theories,” and says that how anyone can even find it “plausible” that “such a charge” is worth investigating is “so demented.” (1:56)
Vincent Bugliosi, the author of “Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” says that the “terrible reality” is that the Bush Administration has gotten away with thousands upon thousands of murders. Bugliosi says that the evidence for the impeachment charges put on former President Bill Clinton were “infinitely less significant” than those found under the Bush Administration. He says that based on the evidence written in his book, Congress should not have “any difficulty making a criminal referral to the Department of Justice” in order to commence a criminal investigation of the Bush Administration. Bugliosi says that every American should be outraged by what the Bush Administration has done. (1:29)
The Democratic National Committee hosted a conference call to discuss Senator John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) position on the Community Choice Act. The Community Choice act is a top priority of the disability community that would allow people with disabilities the chance to choose home-based or community care with in-home services over being forced into nursing homes or institutions. The act would increase the percentage of Medicaid that goes toward in-home care. (more…)
Bruce Fein, Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan, says that the executive branch of the U.S. government under the Bush Administration has destroyed the time-honored checks-and-balances and taken the country “perilly close to executive despotism.” He says that the executive branch does not accept that the U.S. was “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that sovereignty in a republican form of government lies with the people.” (2:02)
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) says that the war in Iraq was totally unnecessary, unprovoked and unjustified. (0:32)
At a discussion hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Iraqi Prime Minister and current member of Parliament, Ayad Allawi, describes the failures of the Parliament to create democracy. He says millions of Iraqis would not be fleeing their country if it was a free democracy. He says fourteen-year-old Iraqi girls fled the country to be prostitutes in Syria rather than remain in unstable Iraq. (1:03)
Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) says that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is responsible for the escape of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. (1:01)
