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faithless

I had the pleasure of speaking with author and lawyer Andrew McCarthy today about his new book “Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.” Here’s the public podcast of our conversation. You’ll find the player at the bottom of this page and can listen directly here or download.

Please spread the word and share the podcast with friends and followers. And do get the book as it will help inform all of us about the our history and options is the president continues to treat the Constitution like a dirty dish rag.

About Andrew McCarthy:

Andy is best known as the leading prosecutor against Blind Sheik (Omar Abdel Rahman) and eleven other jihadists for waging a war against the United States – including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and plot to bomb New York City landmarks. The New York Times did this profile piece on him a few years ago. He is currently a senior fellow at National Review Institute, and a contributing editor at National Review.

In the book, McCarthy makes the first serious effort to build an indictment of the nation’s 45th president by dispassionately, and patiently examining the extent of the administration’s lawlessness and provides a little history lesson about why the Founders were so adamant about including Impeachment as a safeguard against abuse of power by the Chief Executive. As McCarthy points out, impeachment was seen as primarily as a political remedy, not a legal one— that is, it was the mechanism the people could employ to remove the president when he had violated the high trust reposed in him by incompetence, mendacity, and fraud.

About Faithless Execution:

We still imagine ourselves a nation of laws, not of men. This is not merely an article of faith but a bedrock principle of the United States Constitution. Our founding compact provides a remedy against rulers supplanting the rule of law, and Andrew C. McCarthy makes a compelling case for using it.

The authors of the Constitution saw practical reasons to place awesome powers in a single chief executive, who could act quickly and decisively in times of peril. Yet they well understood that unchecked power in one person’s hands posed a serious threat to liberty, the defining American imperative. Much of the debate at the Philadelphia convention therefore centered on how to stop a rogue executive who became a law unto himself.

The Framers vested Congress with two checks on presidential excess: the power of the purse and the power of impeachment. They are potent remedies, and there are no others.

It is a straightforward matter to establish that President Obama has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a term signifying maladministration and abuses of power by holders of high public trust. But making the legal case is insufficient for successful impeachment, leading to removal from office. Impeachment is a political matter and hinges on public opinion.

In Faithless Execution, McCarthy weighs the political dynamics as he builds a case, assembling a litany of abuses that add up to one overarching offense: the president’s willful violation of his solemn oath to execute the laws faithfully. The “fundamental transformation” he promised involves concentrating power into his own hands by flouting law—statutes, judicial rulings, the Constitution itself—and essentially daring the other branches of government to stop him. McCarthy contends that our elected representative are duty-bound to take up the dare.

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1 Comment | Leave a comment
  1. Alain41 says:

    Great to hear Andrew McCarthy. His legal insights are informative.

    Regarding faithless execution of the law, here’s a good NRO article on how EPA has chosen to find that 2 amendments to the Clean Air Act are contradictory thereby allowing EPA to ignore one of the amendments thereby allowing EPA to issue its carbon dioxide rule. Amendments can be/should be read as not impacting one another and that both shall be complied with, which would not allow new EPA rule.
    http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/379753/inventing-ambiguities-clean-air-act-jonathan-keim

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