By the Obama administration. Hey, why let a pesky constitution get in the way of a friendly leftist dictator? That could be a bad precedent for their own future.
[Late morning update]
Ten days that shook Honduras: a brief history.
10 thoughts on “Contempt For The Rule Of Law”
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I wish out impeachment process were as effective as Honduras’.
The corner apparently doesn’t read Rand’s comment thread.
IMHO, whether it was intentional or not, the lack of an explicit set of procedures for impeachment in this case is a valid defensive mechanism for the constitution.
After all, if the constitution says that somebody who does X must be impeached by body Y, then said somebody just has to lean on body Y to find them not guilty. Witness the trial of William Jefferson Clinton, who was guilty of the charges that were brought against him, but was acquitted due to the larger political conflict that deemed those charges insufficient to warrant actual removal. If Clinton had been guilty of grabbing power from all sides in the Senate, rather than his actual crimes? He would have been convicted.
Now, imagine that he was grabbing power illegally from Congress, but he had an armed paramilitary backing him personally, with which he could threaten the Senate. That’s the kind of politics that you see in the region, and Hondurans wrote their constitution specifically to prevent that.
Rather than appointing a specific body of people who can be pressured personally and specifically, their constitution simply says that whoever breaks these particular anti-strongman laws is out of office, period. The lack of a formal trial process invariably means that the fight will boil out into the public sphere, involve the military, and make a real mess–but that’s a better outcome than to have a formal process that gets subverted, keeping the military, judiciary, etc., on a flimsy legal leash.
It’s sausage, it’s not pretty, but in this case, I think the constitution did what it was supposed to do in about the best way that you expect from the situation.
Are there any so-called “right-wing” dictatorships anymore? Would Egypt qualify? And don’t try to pin the nutjobs running the Islamic Republic or Iran on us.
On the other hand, look at the list of left-wing allies for The Magic Teleprompter to choose from and excuse: North Korea to China to Cuba to Bolivia to Venezuela to Vietnam to Zimbabwe to various parts of the Soviet Union, they all seem to claim to be on the Left.
It is too bad we don’t have such a feature in our own Constitution. O’Bama would be out of power already, since he’s been ruling as if no such document exists.
The ignorant MSM went down the same trail in calling this a coup. They believe anything he tells them until beaten severely with the cluebat and many not even then.
Our impeachment process would work fine if the population understood and appreciated the founding principles. So where’s the problem? Education. I’ve read many times that the way we [don’t] educate our children should be considered an act of war against this country.
The cluebat used to work on journalists. What happened and when?
I said somewhere in Volokhville that our impeachment process is like Romeo being tried by a jury of Montagues and Capulets. Socrates had a more impartial jury.
“The lack of a formal trial process invariably means that the fight will boil out into the public sphere, involve the military, and make a real mess–but that’s a better outcome than to have a formal process that gets subverted, keeping the military, judiciary, etc., on a flimsy legal leash.”
The founders were concerned about having too much gov’t with direct control of the military. They were very concerned about generals becoming dictators. So, they chose a more gentlemanly path to resolve dispute.
I agree that in Honduras’s situation the supreme court made a prudent swift decision to put the military into full use. If it is going to be used in any capacity it should be at times used to its fullest capacity.
I will add that the founders did think that the Constitution ended up giving too much power to the executive from the very get go.
Lincoln was one of the first presidents to really use implied powers to make sweeping changes to the power structure of the executive federal office.
People in the MSM keep telling Obama that he is so much just like Lincoln. I am afraid that Obama only recognizes how Lincoln transformed the executive office’s power structure. He wants to, in his own way, adopt some of those expansion of authority ideals. Just look at the car industry and financial sectors to name a few examples.