Republican Party Doctrine: "You Don't Need Facts To Impeach A President"

I'm not sure when Rick Perlstein started writing his new book, The Invisible Bridge-- The Fall Of Reagan And The Rise Of Reagan, but I'll guess it was at least a year or two before Boehner came up with his lame-brained idea to sue President Obama. In it, though, is a pretty powerful reminder of just what an imperial presidency was, replete with the kind of overstepping of boundaries of which Boehner is accusing Obama. He quoted a contemporaneous issue of Time summarizing the still unfolding Republican Party Watergate scandal: that the June 1972 burglary "has been revealed as clearly part of a far greater campaign of political espionage designed to give Nixon an unfair, illegal-- and unnecessary-- advantage in his reelection drive. It was financed with secret campaign funds, contributed in cash by anonymous donors and never fully accounted for, in violation of the law. Then, after the arrests in the Watergate break-in, the same funds were used to persuade most of them to plead guilty and keep quiet about any higher involvement. Time concluded that the "scandal was rapidly emerging as probably the most pervasive instance of top-level misconduct in history." A high official at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue reported the mood in the West Wing: "It's like the last days in a Berlin bunker in 1945. They're all sitting there waiting for the bombs to drop."

Boehner thinks postponing the employee mandate-- something every Republican in the House had urged him to do, and had voted for him to do-- is a sign of an imperial presidency? Perlstein explained why the sobriquet "King Richard" was beginning to stick:

As part of his plan to dismantle as much of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society as he could, Nixon hired a thirty-two-year-old right-wing activist named Howard Phillips, ostensibly to to "run" the Office of Economic Opportunity-- but actually to take the agency apart piece by piece. And on the same April 11, a federal judge ruled on what the Washington Post called "the most brazen usurpation of the powers of Congress and as crass an assault on its prerogatives": that if the president let Howard Phillips continue to dismember OEO, he "would be clothing the President with a power entirely to control the legislation of Congress, and paralyze the administration of justice."

And then there was Watergate-- of which Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had just testified before Congress, defending Richard Nixon's novel doctrine of executive privilege in a way that drove senators insane.

"The Congress has no power at all to command testimony from the executive departments?" asked Edmund Muskie, the object of the worst Watergate dirty tricks during the 1972 presidential campaign season.

Replied Kleindienst, "If the President of the United States so directs."

"Do we have the right to command you to testify against the will of the President?"

"If the President directs me not to appear, I am not going to appear."

"Does that apply to every appointee of the Executive Branch?"

"I'd have to say that is correct." And if Congress did not like that, Kleindienst continued, it could "cut off our funds, abolish most of what we can do, or impeach the president."

Senative Ervin, startled, followed up: how could an impeachment take place if none of the president's men could be compelled to supply facts? Kleindienst's answer was chilling and strange: "You don't need facts to impeach a president."

Congress back then chose not to harm the country by cutting off funds and making it impossible for the Executive Branch to function and they chose not to start some pussy lawsuit. The began the process of impeachment. And Nixon, drunk and drugged up, resigned on disgrace in return for a guarantee he wouldn't face prison time.