De Bush Bende 66

'Rupert Cornwell: The US constitution can't let Bush go
The system surely makes it far too difficult to get rid of a president
Saturday, 24 May 2008


From the opposite side of the Atlantic we watch in amazement. The ruling Labour Party suffers one by-election defeat – a stinging one admittedly, but no more stinging than the one inflicted on George Bush's Republicans here this month in a once rock-solid Congressional district in Mississippi – and a Prime Minister who has been in office less than 11 months risks losing his head, or at least his job.

Yet Bush will remain in office, whatever happens, until next 20 January, despite a record of virtually unmitigated failure both at home and abroad. No matter that ordinary Americans are realising the damage he has inflicted on their country's reputation and moral standing. No matter that three out of four of them want him gone, or that historians have long rated him one of the worst presidents ever, if not the very worst. There's no way of getting rid of Bush before the appointed moment. Such are the increasingly evident shortcomings of that lauded exemplar of human political order, the American constitution.

Not that the jettisoning of Gordon Brown, should it occur, will be pretty. It would be a grimy little palace coup, in which the party's elected representatives decided to remove by acclamation a leader they installed by acclamation, with scarcely a nod to the views of ordinary voters.

One would like to think that Labour MPs were acting entirely out of concern for the national well-being. At least as strong a motive, however, would be the desire to save their skins at the next election. But to an extent, Brown would have been removed because he had been found wanting at his job. To which a large majority of Americans will murmur ... if only.

It may be too easy to get rid of a prime minister in Britain. You don't need a massive crisis; sometimes mere ennui will do the trick. You don't even need a declared majority of the PM's own party in Parliament – see Chamberlain (Neville) in May 1940, and Thatcher (Margaret) in November 1990.

But it is surely far too difficult to get rid of a US president. The process of impeachment stipulated by the constitution, ponderous and scrupulously fair, worked with Nixon after Watergate. But the next time it was tried, against Bill Clinton on the grounds he had sought to obstruct justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair, it descended into a partisan squabble.'

Lees verder:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rupert-cornwell/rupert-cornwell-the-us-constitution-cant-let-bush-go-833597.html