Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold has now positioned himself to the Left of Mars in preparation for his 2008 run by declaring his intention to introduce a Senatorial resolution of censure of President George W. Bush for his pernicious insistence on tapping incoming overseas Al Qaeda telephone calls. <!--break-->

Not only is what the President done not censurable (on the contrary, it is quite laudable), NOTHING ANY President does or can do is exclusively censurable, for there is no Constitutional mooring for this punative notion. You either impeach him, or impeach him and convict him, or you do nothing. 

Thereby, should the Senate fail to convict, impeachment as a stand alone IS censure, as we pointed out on December 16th, 1998, in reference to the fiasco that was Year Sixxx of the William Jefferson Blythe Clinton Administration.

But why would Senator Feingold allow the Constitution to at all impede what he wishes to do? He, nor far too many of his electoral brethren, yet have.

Impeachment IS Censure For Clinton's defenders, the call for an extra-Constitutional punishment proves they are missing the point

Maybe those dead white guys weren't so dumb after all.

According to the latest (yuck) polls, it appears that a majority of Americans today are unknowledgeable of the impeachment process in which the U. S. House of Representatives is currently engaged.

They do not have a general idea of what impeachment is, let alone any inkling of the individual steps and procedural maneuverings that must take place for it to reach it's penultimate goal, the removal of a president from office.

So to poll the citizenry and call for the results to be used as the basis for political action is not the soundest of strategies.

Their call for censure is either inherently foolish, or blatantly political at the expense of the Constitution and their knowledge of it.

Bill Clinton's defenders in Congress should possess a Constitutional awareness greater than the general populace. They all take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution; they should not take this pledge without a firm understanding of what is contained therein.

Nowhere in the document's description of the impeachment process is censure mentioned. Each step that is to be taken is clearly earmarked, and must be followed by those who are duty-bound to do so.

So for the Congressional members, and the rest of us, who don't understand the process now under way in Washington, a synopsis appears to be in order. Maybe then it will become clear that James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of those vilified white men from days of yore did indeed know what they were doing.

The first step in the impeachment process is to have a president that engages in potentially impeachable acts. Fortunately (for the good of this exercise) or unfortunately (for the country), we now have someone imminently qualified for this in William Jefferson Clinton. The definition of impeachable acts as stated in the Constitution is: "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors".

This is an intentionally vague description. The founding fathers wanted the Congress to decide whether the actions of the president warranted impeachment. In this instance the House Judiciary Committee, led by Representative Henry Hyde (Republican, Illinois), convened to make the call.

In this, the third engagement in the presidential impeachment process in our history, the Judiciary Committee came together to review the results of the investigations of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

Janet Reno, the head of the Justice Department, appointed Judge Starr to look into several things. The specific findings that led to the House's impeachment inquiry involved actions by the president in his responses and reactions to the Paula Jones civil lawsuit.

Specifically, his denial under oath of a relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, his attempts to get others to corroborate his testimony, and the misuse of the powers of his office to artificially delay the administering of justice in the Jones suit. Representative Hyde convened the Judiciary Committee to have them listen to Judge Starr's evidence and to hear the White House's defense.

After both sides were heard from, it was determined by the committee that there were four instances of action by the President that warranted articles of impeachment. Two were for charges of perjury, one for obstruction of justice, and one for abuse of power.

They were then each individually voted on by the members of the committee. A simple majority was required for passage. All four articles were agreed to, meaning they were then to be sent to the full House of Representatives for a floor vote. At the time of this writing, this is where we stood in the process.

The full U. S. House will vote on each of the articles. Again, a simple majority is required for passage. If any of the four articles pass, the President of the United States is officially impeached.

This does not mean he is removed from office. It means that a trial is to be conducted in the Senate to determine whether the ratified impeachment article(s) warrant his removal.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court conducts the trial. In this case, it is the Honorable William Rehnquist who will preside. The representative who ran the House's impeachment inquiry, in this case Henry Hyde, acts as the case's prosecutor. The president has his legal representatives there to proffer his defense. As of right now, that would be a team led by Charles Ruff and David Kendall.

The members of the Senate act as the jury. They hear the case and then vote on whether or not to convict the president. Unlike the tallies in the House of Representatives, a two-thirds majority is required for Senate conviction. If they vote to convict, then and only then is the president removed from office.

It is here that the brilliance of the founding fathers becomes evident, and the call for presidential censure becomes moot. First and foremost, contrary to the protestations of the President’s allies, the founders meant for impeachment to be a political procedure.

That is why they placed its adjudication in the legislative branch. If it were to be a strictly legal action, they would have had the Supreme Court handle it. So the cry for bi-partisanship and for the removal of politics from the process is disingenuous, or at the least an inaccurate understanding of the constitutional requirements of the impeachment procedure.

As in all political things, the founders meant for the House of Representatives to be a place of hot, fast action, and the Senate to serve as a place of cooling thought and reflection. That is why the impeachment passage requirements are set-up as they are in our bi-cameral system.

The simple majority requirements in the House allow the Congress to simultaneously carry out its part of the impeachment process and register disapproval for the actions of the president. They did believe, however, that the final act of removing a sitting president from office should not be so easy, and therefore established the two-thirds vote requirement in the Senate.

Thus the notion of censure is inherently a part of impeachment (those old tobacco farmers thought of everything, didn't they?). An affirmative vote in the House denotes awareness of and condemnation for the president's wrongdoings. But this by itself does not remove him from office.

So what we have now is the President's defenders calling for his impeachment under the new name of censure, which would allow him to be reprimanded without the trial and potential removal from office that is supposed to accompany the House vote.

A sort of impeachment lite, a diet impeachment, with (less than) half the consequences of a regular impeachment. This is a notion no true believer in the Constitution can accept.

To make a proper decision on the impeachment process one must first understand it. A vote of conscience would hopefully also be a vote of informed intelligence. So far, many members of the House have displayed their Constitutional ignorance.

The Senators have some time to catch up on their reading before their big test comes. Let us pray they avail themselves of it.

The founding fathers would expect no less.

Though it is obviously, unfortunately, asking far too much of this current bunch.