via Op-Ed Columnist – Forgive and Forget? – NYTimes.com.
Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.
Nobel Prize winning Economist Paul Krugman
The Op-Ed Columnist here is none other than the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. I love him, but before one saddles up on that high horse of justice and demands action, there may be some things worth exploring first in order to avoid legal catastrophes later down the line.
I worry about the idea of a witch hunt composed of teams of Justice Department or FBI agents carefully sifting through mountains of paperwork looking for any smoking gun they can find. They would look for documentation of torture, rendition, politicization of public office, wiretapping, ulterior motives for war in Iraq, and a myriad other crimes that were certainly committed by the Bush administration.
These actions were illegal, and they did happen. But something very bad happened on the way to the courthouse. The most egregious of Bush’s offenses morphed and changed before our eyes - into…into…legal things.
The illegal invasion of Iraq was blessed by Congress. It was all legal. The AUMF in 2002 made it so. Remember that? 77 Senators, 29 of whom were Democrats including John Kerry, Presidential Candidate in 2004, and Hillary “Glass Ceiling” Clinton, Presidential hopeful 2008, voted to support Bush’s war.
The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.
President Bush dismissed science and instead looked to corporate experts to guide him on policy. Is that illegal? Congress didn’t think so. Where was the outrage in Congress at the time when Bush’s cronyism was running rampant? Even if there were more voices speaking up in Congress at that time over the appointment of the heads of the biggest polluters to the EPA, even if they screamed and screamed, was there any legal recourse to stop Bush’s appointments? If the Senate approves appointments of cronies, then just who is committing the crime here?
Actions without foresight, and bad assumptions that a President would never commit crimes put Congress in a box. Congress could have prevented all this mess if they had had a Democratic majority in the beginning, back in 2001. Democrats could have salvaged some oversight even in the minority if that minority just stood up and not been either blinded by patriotism or cow-towed by Bush’s gun slinging swagger.
So how are you going to conduct an investigation into Bush’s crimes when another branch of government, Congress, which can’t be held responsible, supported the crimes?
It was the Republicans (and more often than not, aided by Democrats) in the Senate that enabled Mr. Bush.
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