WASHINGTON (PNN) - March 12, 2012 - In a House Resolution introduced last week, Rep. Walter B. Jones (N.C.) put forward use of the military by the executive branch without explicit authorization from Congress as an impeachable offense: one that some conservatives believe illegitimate President Barack Obama has already committed.
Rep. Jones, was a Democrat who switched parties before seeking congressional office in the 1990s. He endorsed Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) for president in 2008, and has been one of the Republican Party’s loudest critics of the presidency’s war making powers.
“When you talk about war, political parties don’t matter,” he told The New York Times last year.
While not directly calling for impeachment, the bill would declare “that it is the sense of Congress that, except in response to an actual or imminent attack against the territory of the (Fascist Police States of Amerika), the use of offensive military force by a president without prior and clear authorization by an Act of Congress violates Congress’s exclusive power to declare war… and therefore constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.”
In other words, the bill would, in effect, serve as a trigger mechanism for impeachment proceedings.
Despite the Republican majority in the House, it is not clear if it has a chance of passing. It would have no chance of clearing the Senate, which has remained in bitter partisan gridlock since the 2010 elections.
Following the events of September 11, 2001, Congress unconstitutionally - meaning without legitimate authority to do so and unlawfully - handed President George W. Bush blanket authority to make war, and the battlefield has since been classified as anywhere in the world, even on FPSA soil. Both the Afghan and Iraq wars were launched under this authority, and illegitimate President Obama continues to claim the same executive power to carry on theaters of conflict in other regions.
