Congress Asserts Its Power;
Will Impeachment Come Next?
by Nancy Spannaus and Jeffrey Steinberg
July 29—With its overwhelming vote on July 25 to reassert the unique constitutional power of Congress, not the President, to decide whether the nation should go to war, the U.S. Congress delivered a decisive repudiation of British puppet President Barack Obama. The historic vote of 370 to 40 on House Concurrent Resolution 105 simply stated that “the president shall not deploy or maintain United States Armed Forces in a sustained combat role in Iraq without specific statutory authorization for such use.”
The resounding bipartisan vote was taken after an hour-long debate, in which lead sponsors Reps. James McGovern (D-Mass.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), among others, stressed its significance as a return to a constitutional principle which has been consistently violated by Presidents from both parties. The principle is enshrined in Article I, Section 8, and is specified in the enabling legislation known as the War Powers Act, which HCR 105 cites.
The situation is now ripe for Congress to reassert its constitutional responsibility in other crucial areas, including the economy, by taking immediate action to reinstate the Glass-Steagall law, and the American System of economics as a whole, as Lyndon LaRouche demanded in his “Four New Laws To Save the U.S.A. Now!” http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2014/4124four_laws.html
It’s obvious that there was a “complete breakdown” in the ability of Obama and his British sponsors to control the situation, commented LaRouche. “They couldn’t hold it together.”
But the way is open, and it is urgent, for the Congress to assert its constitutional obligation to impeach Obama, and to carry out a “full sweep of an honest system of financial management among nations,” LaRouche continued.
“The world does not have to be run the way it has been run heretofore. The world can be run on a fair basis for the improvement of the productive powers of labor in every nation. That’s what we have to shoot for.”
In fact, the seed crystal for such a new international system was established with the recent meeting of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in Brazil, which, in solidarity with the nations of South America, launched a project based on rejecting the current usurious financial system, and replacing it with one providing credit for high-technology development projects, based on increasing energy-flux density, development of thermonuclear fusion power, and cooperation among sovereign nations.
Both the passage of HCR 105 and the launching of the BRICS project, which involves nations representing nearly half of humanity, have been virtually blacked out of the “mainstream” (read, sewer) U.S. media. “Why has there been almost no media coverage of this?” LaRouche demanded in relation to HCR 105. “Why is Obama just sitting back there like a dumb louse and taking the blows that are administered to him without response? Why is Obama hiding? Why is he just taking the blows, and not even attempting to defend his honor in terms of what he’s doing? Obama has been exposed as a faker.”
Thus, the way is wide open for Congress to act.
Senior Washington sources confirmed LaRouche’s evaluation of the magnitude and portent of Obama’s defeat, reporting that there is now a complete repudiation of Obama’s foreign and national security policies by Republicans and Democrats alike. This has been building for some time, but it finally exploded around the HCR 105 vote, as it well could have on any issue involving the national interest, as distinct from partisan politics. “There is zero trust in the President,” one source stated. “The climate for passage of Glass-Steagall is greater now than at any point since repeal, and this will accelerate as Members of Congress return to their districts to campaign and get an earful about the disastrous conditions facing a majority of their constituents.”
A Cumulative Impact
Since Obama’s re-election in November 2012, his Presidency has been under the gun of one scandal and policy failure after another. The cumulative impact of these scandals has now reached a point where the issue of Obama’s removal from office—first raised by Lyndon LaRouche in April 2009—is on the minds of a growing majority of citizens and legislators.
A poll this week showed that 64% of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service is lying about the missing e-mails from former IRS official Lois Lerner, who is at the center of the scandal involving the targeting of tax-exempt conservative groups by the IRS.
The Benghazi scandal, highlighted by the recently published book Blood Feud by journalist Edward Klein, puts President Obama personally in the middle of lying to Congress and the American people. According to Klein’s account, President Obama called then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at 10 p.m. on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, as the attacks on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi were still underway, and ordered her to put out a false press statement, blaming the assault—in which four Americans were killed including Ambassador Christopher Stevens—on “spontaneous” protesters angered at a defamatory video about the Prophet Mohammed. By that time, top Administration officials, including Clinton and Obama, knew that the attack was a premeditated, heavily armed assault by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, Ansar al-Sharia.
Add in the National Security Agency’s illegal spying, the President’s unconstitutional orders to murder American citizens without due process, the spying on journalists, and the continuing rule by Executive decree, usurping the powers of Congress, and the preconditions are in place for a bipartisan impeachment proceeding in the House of Representatives.
Executive Paralysis
A leading Washington source added that both Democrats and Republicans are fed up with the fact that the President has not only failed to consult with or inform Congress about plans for dealing with the Iraq and Syria crises and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State (formerly ISIS); he has failed to make any policy decisions or take any actions whatsoever.
The source cited the recent emergency evacuation of American diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya. “It was a policy failure at the top, not an intelligence failure,” he asserted. The White House had been provided with a detailed intelligence assessment of the growing crisis in Libya and the danger to American diplomatic personnel. The warnings were delivered weeks ago, yet there was no action from the White House until the situation reached a point of desperation, where American fighter planes and drones had to be deployed to provide air cover as American personnel fled Tripoli in a caravan of armored cars.
Another source noted that Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had begged President Obama, personally, in March, to launch air strikes against ISIS bases, prior to the group taking control over much of northern Iraq and declaring an Islamic State. President Obama took no action, and when public criticism surfaced, the White House claimed that it had never received a “formal” request from the Iraqi government.
The source leveled another harsh warning about the disarray at the Obama White House. He noted that one of the most important things for any President, particularly going into the end phase of his second term in office, is to retain the loyalty of his closest aides and advisors. In the Obama case, he is an absolute failure.
The source cited the case of Dr. Susan Rice, who was dispatched by Obama while still at the United Nations to deliver the lying account of the Benghazi attack days after it occurred. She was more recently sent out to also make a fool of herself around the case of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier captured by the Taliban and released in exchange for five Taliban fighters held at Guantanamo Bay. Rice dutifully went on national television to tout the “successful” freeing of Bergdahl, when the entire affair was a violation of the law (Congress should have been informed 30 days in advance of the prisoner swap), and proved to be a political fiasco as well, when details of Bergdahl’s record surfaced and it turned out that the five Taliban leaders were among the most “high valued” prisoners in U.S. custody.
The list of blunders, abuses of trust and indecisions goes on and on, the source emphasized.
Demonizing Putin and Provoking War
President Obama has also gone out of his way to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin. Obama is being used by his British sponsors to create the conditions for a new Cold War, which could easily erupt into a hot war, even a thermonuclear confrontation. From the standpoint of Obama’s inner circle of advisors, it makes sense for Obama to demonize his Russian counterpart in an effort to divert attention away from his own plunging approval ratings. While Putin is enjoying unprecedented popular support, estimated in a recent Russian poll at over 82%, Obama’s approval rating is in the mid-30s percentile on a very good day.
This kind of geopolitical demonizing is a very very dangerous thing to be doing, particularly when the Ukrainian government is engaging in a vicious bombing campaign against pro-Russian populations in the east of the country, and NATO is promoting a new “containment” deployment into Central Europe, bordering on Russia.
The fact that the Obama Presidency is in a state of free fall does not minimize the war danger. In fact, it adds an element of desperation that can drive the world to the brink of general war. Obama’s meltdown coincides with a looming breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, a breakdown that will impel the British to seek war as an alternative to an orderly restructuring. Now that the BRICS group of nations has raised the issue of a new financial architecture, the prospect for such a change is vastly improved.
The Next Steps
If the United States were to align with the BRICS initiative—starting with the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall—the war danger could be eliminated, along with the system of the Anglo-Dutch empire. Obama’s removal from office by constitutional means would be another crucial step towards the war-avoidance so urgently needed at this time. The HCR 105 vote in the House of Representatives is a big move in the right direction.
As one source noted, the broad support for Glass-Steagall in the population makes it a natural next step for bipartisan action to reinstate constitutional government. There are bipartisan bills in the House and the Senate, HR 129 and S 1282, which could, and must, easily be put on the floor and voted up. Such a move is urgent both to save the United States from the next impending crash, and to initiate the process of implementing the Four Laws program of LaRouche, which is necessary to rebuild the U.S. and world economy.
