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My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.
Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX)
House Judiciary Committee
Statement on the Articles of Impeachment
July 25, 1974
I was 17 when Barbara Jordan, a junior member of Congress whose very presence on the House Judiciary Committee was living testimony to decades of struggle to make democracy real, explained her decision to vote for the impeachment of then-president Richard M. Nixon with this simple testament of faith. Her speech included a detailed review of the constitutional criteria for impeachment matched against Nixon's actions surrounding the Watergate break-in and cover-up plot. The House Judiciary hearings had been must-see TV all that summer, and like millions of Americans, I had been a faithful viewer, so by the time Jordan made her speech, even many conservatives and Republicans were convinced that Nixon had violated his oath of office.
The moment was powerful drama and a profound lesson for many of us about what means to live up to John Adams' dictum that we were to have "a government of laws, not of men." At 17, I heard in Jordan's words the possibility of redemption and reconciliation in a nation where the promise of democracy had been attacked not only by the actions of the Nixon White House, but also by such actions as the assassinations of King and the brothers Kennedy, the atrocities at My Lai, and the gunning down of peaceful protestors at Kent State. I was not alone. After the House committee vote, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis' July 28, 1974 column said:
"Since the story of Watergate began there have been those who doubted that America could rouse itself to respond. Others, believing in this extraordinary country,were confident that it could confound the skeptics.
"If there is vindication of hope in the Judiciary Committee proceedings, it is partly because there was no pretense that the issues were easy."
Thirty-five years later, we face another test of our commitment to Constitutional principles in the revelations from the US Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and the Senate Armed Services Committee (.pdf) about the treatment of detained terrorist suspects in US prisons at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. We know now that the practices now at the center of controversy were authorized by senior US government officials, including then Vice President Cheney. Further, there is evidence that some of the tactics were being used well before the Office of Legal Counsel supplied the widely-discredited rationale for their use. The question is whether we believe we have the strength, as a nation in the midst of war, to lay the truth of these actions before the world and hold those responsible accountable.
Foreign Services Committee chair Carl Levin (D-MI) urges the Justice Department to appoint an independent panel to get truth out:
If we are to retain our status as the world's leader, and live up to the values that General Petraeus articulated, we must acknowledge and confront the abuse of detainees in our custody. The Committee's report and investigation make significant progress toward that goal. There is still the question, however, of whether high level officials who approved and authorized those policies should be held accountable.
I have recommended to Attorney General Holder that he select a distinguished individual or individuals - either inside or outside the Justice Department, such as retired federal judges, to look at the volumes of evidence relating to treatment of detainees, including evidence in the Senate Armed Services Committee's report, and to recommend what steps, if any, should be taken to establish accountability of high-level officials, including lawyers.
However, leading Republican members of the Armed Services Committee, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along with independent Joseph Lieberman, wrote letters to Pres. Obama this week urging him to protect attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel who provided legal cover for the detainee abuses. Their statement said, in part:
Some of the legal analysis included in the OLC memos released last week was, we believe, deeply flawed. We have also strongly opposed the overly coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that these memos deemed legal. We do not believe, however, that legal analysis should be criminalized, as proposals to prosecute government lawyers suggest. Moving in such a direction would have a deeply chilling effect on the ability of lawyers in any administration to
