After Obama's Hitler Coup:
The Guts To Impeach
Special to EIR
Aug. 9—President Obama has committed high crimes and misdemeanors against the U.S. Constitution that warrant his immediate impeachment. This is no secret: In the course of the Congressional debates on the Libya War, and the more recent Super-Congress debt-ceiling deal, scores of Congressmen openly acknowledged that the President had violated his oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) invoked the image of the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), known as the "conscience of the Senate," descending from Heaven to scold the Senators for capitulating to a wholly unconstitutional deal. Moments later, Durbin voted "yes" on the very measure that he knew was tantamount to treason.
By failing to bring articles of impeachment against the President for taking the nation to war in Libya without Congressional authorization, and by signing on to the Super-Congress "Enabling Law" coup d'état, the majority of members of both the House and Senate have made it clear that, left to their own devices, they are prepared to surrender power to a London-directed dictatorship, just as the German Reichstag capitulated to Hitler in March 1933.
It now lies with the American people to force Congress to act. Unless President Obama is removed from office in the immediate days ahead, there is no solution to the total disintegration of the trans-Atlantic financial system. A vast majority of Americans know this, in their gut. The question is: Will they act in time to save the Republic from otherwise certain doom?
It was on the basis of this assessment that Lyndon LaRouche, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and Jacques Cheminade issued their call to action this week.
Obama's Crimes Dwarf Those of Nixon
The crimes already committed by President Obama dwarf those that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Then, as now, there were three Constitutional options on the table: impeachment; removal from office under the 25th Amendment, Section 4; or resignation. At the time of Nixon's resignation, he was facing an impeachment trial in the Senate. And there was serious consideration of invoking the 25th Amendment, on the grounds that Nixon had gone mad, and was contemplating a dictatorial move.
At the time, leading Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), went to Nixon and bluntly offered him the option of resignation, promising swift impeachment, with overwhelming bipartisan support, if he refused.
That took guts, and a serious understanding that the oath of office is not a hollow matter. But so far, even those lawmakers who have attacked the President for having violated the Constitution have run the other way, when confronted with the question of removing him from office.
Yet, as LaRouche has stressed, there is no way the United States, and subsequently the rest of the world, can pull out of the present existential crisis if British puppet Barack Obama is not removed from office. It must be done constitutionally, for the sake of our republic, but it must be done. There is ample evidence, known even more intimately by insiders than by this news service, that Obama is a mental case, a deranged narcissist who will never "reform," but who is easily manipulated by the Wall Street-London powers who orchestrated his accession to office. Add to this, his commitment to the Hitler-modelled policies in health care and government, and the combination is fatal—if the American people don't force Congress to act.
Two Brave Congressmen
So far, only two sitting Congressmen have explicitly attacked the Obama Enabling Act as unconstitutional. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), also a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination, responded to a question about the bill's constitutionality by saying, "I don't think there's any doubt about it," explaining: "Where does it say that we can set up a program like this and then pop something back into the House and Senate and say you have a vote, you can't take it to a subcommittee or full committee?" he asked. "So no, that is not what was set up by the Constitution. That was so far removed that it almost becomes a silly notion."
Speaking on CNBC, Paul said: "I would challenge it in the courts and say that it is not a constitutional function.... There's no authority to have a super-Congress who takes over for what the House and Senate are supposed to do."
Rep. Maxine Water (D-Calif.) directly, but mildly charged that the bill was unconstitutional during the House debate. "I am very concerned with the precedent set by this 'super committee,' whose establishment threatens our democratic process with its unconstitutional structure," Waters said, and called it the "worst piece of public policy ever."
EIR has received reports that a number of members of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose chairman, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), called the deal a "Satan sandwich," are considering challenging the constitutionality of the Super-Congress in court. But a court procedure is slow and laborious compared to the urgency of the situation: Obama has to be removed now, before his coup is consolidated.
Establishing a 'Junta'
No one can claim ignorance of the nature of the bill which Obama rammed through in order to bypass the Congress. LPAC-TV has produced a series of videos pinpointing the parallel to Hitler's Enabling Legislation, which eviscerated the power of the German parliament. Then, from the "left" and the "right," journalists and academics have issued devastatingly accurate analyses of the nature of the bill.
Among the most striking was that from Democratic economist James Galbraith, in an interview with the Italian daily Il Messaggero published Aug. 9. Asked whether the super-committee will give the right suggestions, Galbraith says:
"For God's sake! It will be a Junta, a body without legitimacy. It would be better to leave decisions to Members of Congress; true, they quarrel even in a dirty way, but eventually they must always be accountable to their constituencies. This committee created out of nothing, without political controls, worries me a lot."
Galbraith exposes the fact that both the U.S. and Europe are run by "a technocracy, or better, a tutor-cracy, a situation in which the U.S.A. is under the tutelage of a bunch of financial bureaucrats, and Europe is in the hands of an illegitimate central bank. The bureaucrats are the members of rating agencies, Standard & Poor's, for instance, who want to model the political life of this country after their views, and maybe exploit this alleged debt crisis in order to dispose once and for all with the welfare state. In Europe, you have a central bank which is accountable to no one; with us, at least, the Fed must be accountable to Congress for its actions."
In an article published by Deutsche Welle on Aug. 8, Galbraith made a similar point: "The debt deal will make things clear. The President is not a progressive—he is not what Americans still call a liberal. He is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result."
Galbraith's argument is seconded in Michael Brenner's "J'Accuse," an article appearing in Huffington Post Aug. 8. Brenner, a Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, writes:
"Emile Zola's passionate denunciation of the persecution of Major Alfred Dreyfus by bigoted, ancien régime leaders of the French army was a landmark achievement for the voice of righteous protest. A call to the nation's moral conscience, it galvanized a movement that forced Dreyfus' exoneration," he begins. He then makes the point that precisely that kind of call to moral conscience is required today.
"As an attack on the authority of the peoples' elected representatives by the creation of an ad hoc 'super Congress,' it erodes the constitutional foundations of the Republic. As a success for the rabid dogmatists who held hostage the financial solvency of the United States to exact a ransom whose terms are rejected by a large majority of the citizenry, it rewards behavior inimical to democracy. In demonstrating the minority power of financial special interests to impose itself on the country, the crisis has confirmed the plutocratic realities of our current situation while sowing the seeds of strife down the road. In demonstrating how craven is the Democratic Party—the self-avowed party of the 'little' people—it has highlighted the hollowness of our much touted two-party system. In demonstrating that the Democrats, in a crunch, give priority to well-heeled campaign contributors over their electoral constituency, it has made a mockery of the principle of representation. Government of the people, by the people, for the people has never been in greater danger.
"Then there is Mr. Barack Obama—nominally President of the United States.... Barack Obama has failed the country. Moreover, it is a failure that is not dictated by the array of forces or flawed strategy. The truth is far more troubling. He has failed us due to a lack of conviction, a lack of appreciation where the path of presidential duty lies, a lack of courage, and no lack of expedient impulses to promote himself....
"A reactionary coup. A regressive revolution in social policy. An economy doomed to stagnation for sure—and another collapse as a definite possibility. Discredited governmental institutions. The national interest made hostage to the machinations of an extra-constitutional Congressional junta. America the laughingstock of the world—except by those too frightened by the threat we now pose to global stability. Yet, for all these seismic events, the country hides its head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich...."
The left-wing Dissident Voice ran a column Aug. 4 which made the same point: Under the title "The Coup in Washington," Mina Hamilton writes that Congress "is to be pushed aside [and] nullified." She declares that "That is a coup. Albeit it's not a military coup, but the word 'coup' does not require military tanks in the streets or troops swarming onto Capitol Hill."
Congress's Power Nullified
Other analyses have provided conclusive arguments on the unconstitutional, fascist nature of Obama's Budget Control bill, especially as it removes Congress's power over economic policy. We cite the most trenchant:
- Two Republican lawyers, Herbert Titus and William J. Olson, writing for the American Thinker on Aug. 4, argued that the Budget Control Act is unconstitutional in at least two respects. First, although the power to borrow money is vested in Congress by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, the new law actually transfers this power to the President, since he can determine if the debt ceiling is too low and more borrowing is needed, subject only to Congressional disapproval.
Secondly, the new Joint Select Committee undermines the bicameral legislative process established in the Constitution, and compels Members of Congress to yield their individual legislative duties and responsibilities to the new "super-committee." Describing a Hitler-style coup in other terms, Titus and Olson conclude: "Contrived crisis, appeals to fear, emergency litigation, and suspension of Constitutional order—these are the indicia of abuse of power, leading to tyranny."
- On Aug. 5, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, a leader in the fight against Obamacare, credited with some of the thinking behind the slogans "death panels" and "pulling the plug on grandma," wrote a widely circulated column which noted that, "The framers of the Constitution insisted that any new tax originates in the House of Representatives, because its members represent smaller districts rather than an entire state, and are elected every two years. The House would be closest to the people and safeguard their liberty. Even the 100 members of the U.S. Senate were denied the power to propose a tax. Yet the 12 budget bosses can propose a tax—a perversion of the Constitution."
- Conservative columnist Jack Hunter's Aug. 3 column was entitled, " 'Super Congress' is Not Super; It's Not Even Congress." He wrote that, "The entire purpose of voters electing officials to represent them is the notion that Americans should have a voice in Washington. The Founding Fathers understood that pure democracy was as dangerous as it was impractical—but a representative republic, on the other hand, would allow a doable degree of democracy. Those behind the Super Congress have now decided that even the constitutionally proper level of practical democracy is simply too much. Or as Congressman [Ron] Paul explains, this new committee represents 'Nothing more than a way to disenfranchise the majority of Congress by denying them the chance for meaningful participation...'
Obama Got What He Wanted
It's nothing but fear and cowardice that prevents lawmakers of both parties from acting to stem this tyranny in the only way they can—by moving to remove the President. The excuses on the Democratic side, in particular—such as, that will open the way for the nasty right-wing Republicans to come in—are not credible, even to those who mouth them.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), interviewed on Truthdig radio, when asked about the commonplace idea that Obama is just a terrible negotiator who gave away the store, responded, "I don't think the President of the United States ever accepted a deal he didn't want."
Kucinich went on to explain:
"I think that the tell-tale sign was when he put Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the table—which, by the way, when the commission, the super Congress commission comes into effect, will become extremely vulnerable. So the idea of President Obama somehow being incapable of negotiating—excuse me. He knows exactly what he's doing. If he had been in a political trap here, he would have immediately, as a constitutional scholar, resorted to the 14th Amendment.... The 14th Amendment, Section 4, basically empowered the President, if he had been put in a box by the Republicans, to play a trump card. He didn't do that, and he never intended to do that. He got the deal he wanted."
Liberal columnist David Sirota, while putting an odd spin on it, makes a similar argument, in a column entitled "Obama Isn't Weak (He Just Isn't a Liberal)," says that Obama "is achieving exactly what he wants." Sirota goes down the list: "On health care, for instance, Obama passed a Heritage Foundation-inspired bailout of the private health insurance industry.... On foreign policy, he escalated old wars and initiated new ones. On civil liberties, he not only continued the Patriot Act and indefinite detention of terrorism suspects but also claimed the right to assassinate American citizens without charge. On financial issues, he fought off every serious proposal to reregulate banks following the economic meltdown; he preserved ongoing bank bailouts; and he resisted pressure to prosecute Wall Street thieves. On fiscal matters, after extending the Bush tax cuts at a time of massive deficits, he has used the debt ceiling negotiations to set the stage for potentially massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare—cuts that would be far bigger than any of his proposed revenue increases."
In other words, Obama is the fascist he appears to be. He has rammed through legislation to consolidate a coup on behalf of his financier masters. He must be removed.
