On His Last Day in Office, Bush Will Pardon Himself and Cheney

Congress should devise a set of subpoenas that would call the president and vice president to testify about actions that could constitute violations of law and set the stage for a historic Supreme Court decision that would determine whether any president is above the law.

George H. W. Bush charged that those who disclose the identities of covert operatives are committing the equivalent of treason, while George W. Bush believes that those who lie under oath about such matters should receive less jail time than Paris Hilton.

When the president stated he would not intervene in this case until all appeals had been heard, the president was lying.

A majority of Americans believes George W. Bush does not tell the truth. An overwhelming majority of Americans has come to disrespect and disapprove of this president. Throughout the free world there is revulsion and disgust about what this man has done.

Things are being done in this corrupt and failed administration that should never happen in America and have never happened before, in this way, to this magnitude.

Justice Robert Jackson, in his summation at Nuremberg, spoke at length about the ideals of justice being open, decisions being made in public, charges being filed, the law being respected, right to counsel being provided and the common standards of jurisprudence and civilization behind honored.

Never before in American history has any president so casually claimed the power to violate the Bill of Rights and Constitution through secret acts in violation of commonly accepted law.

Never before has an American president claimed unitary powers to violate statutes though signing statements on such a regular and unprecedented scale.

Never before has an American president tried to impose secret courts, secret trials, secret files and secret charges, using secret forms of what the civilized world calls torture, often without the right to counsel, often imprisoning and torturing detainees without filing charges.

Never before has an American president had a vice president who boasts about working on the dark side, and conducts a virtual super-secret government from the vice president’s office while he desperately tries to keep truth from law, and bullies and intimidates those who disagree.

Never before has an American president named and kept an attorney general who defames the very notions of justice in America, devalues the very ideals that our Founding Fathers held so dear, defrauds the nation in public testimony and destroys the entire upper echelon of the administration of justice in America.

Thousands of Gold Star mothers know the price of these transgressions and the pain that has flowed from these obsessions, lies, frauds and misrepresentations that have led our country into the tragedy of Iraq.

Torture in violation of decency and law, secret eavesdropping in violation of constitutional history beyond the reach of the courts and the Congress, lies under oath, slanders of political opponents, Abu Ghraib crimes and the cover-up charged by the general of such integrity he could stay silent no longer — the list of wrongs is long.

Knowing of these crimes more than our people or our system of justice, fearing the exposure that is ultimately inevitable, and well aware of the legal consequences I expect the president, on his last day in office, to issue a series of pardons that would include himself and the vice president.

These pardons would include a list of those most legally vulnerable to the long litany of wrongs, done in secret, but destined for exposure.

Congress should call the leading constitutional authorities in the nation, and devise a series of subpoenas to directly call the president and the vice president to testify on matters that could involve violations of law. This would lead to a historic test case that would decide, once and for all, whether Thomas Paine was right when he stated that in monarchies the king is law, but in America, the law is king.