I wish someone could make a treason case out of perjury in relation to a matter of national security during a time of war for these actions.
This crap would stop pretty fast.
This crap would stop pretty fast.
Plus, no, it wouldn't: the President is both immune to criminal prosecution while in office and has plenary power to pardon, so "someone could make a treason case out of it" wouldn't constrain executive abuses. The only thing that constrains those is a public that cares enough to extract a price for the abuses, starting with public outcry and action at the ballot box.
Which is not to say I think it's a good idea.
This, of course, could be my ignorance. Certainly the only appearance of "immun" in the Constitution is in "immunities" in an unrelated context.
This is not so much an issue of immunity as of a requirement for the prosecution and defense to not be different parties.
> Seems like it would violate the concept of rule of law...
I would argue that the President being immune to prosecution for crimes committed while in office would be a bigger violation of the concept of rule of law than the President being subject to prosecution for such violations but only after leaving office.
While it may not be a good idea to impeach Obama over this, they could impeach Clapper over it, as he is the one who petitioned the government to dismiss the case on the basis that the plaintiffs didn't have grounds as they could not demonstrate that they had been affected, or possibly against Solicitor General Donald Verrilli who made the argument in court. Coupled with his lies to Congress during hearings about whether the NSA collected data on Americans ("not wittingly"), Clapper would probably be the best target.
Political optics, for one thing: they had the vote counts in and knew if he hung around the Senate was going to convict him and kick him out of office, so he was going to be out in any case. Resigning and having the new guy -- who had some credibility with people who had long ago lost any trust in Nixon -- say that a pardon was in the interest of the Nation looked better, while Nixon pardoning himself would have been even more divisive.
There's also, IIRC, at least some dispute about the extent of the scope of the exception to the pardon power that applies in cases of impeachment, and, while I'm not sure that it would have been resolved in a manner unfavorable to Nixon, pardoning himself while he was under an impeachment that had not yet been rendered moot by his resignation (as the impeachment power only extends against civil officers, not past officers) might have sparked an even longer and deeper crisis if someone thought to test the limits there.
The U.S. hasn't convicted someone of treason for more than half a century. Even John Walker Lindh, who was literally fighting with the enemy against the U.S., was not prosecuted for treason.
Its probably because of the narrow definition of treason written explicitly into the Constitution [1].
[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii#section3
Why, so you can stop President Obama being elected for a third term?
To me as an outsider, this is a puzzling part of the US political system. The President has a huge amount of concentrated power within one branch of government, yet approximately half the time, the President of the day is effectively a lame duck with nothing to lose by behaving almost any way they like. Other parts of the government can make that President's job harder, but short of impeachment everyone is basically stuck with whoever it is until their time is up.
I increasingly feel that giving the electorate an absolute power of recall if an elected representative angers enough people during their term would change politics for the better at almost any level. Otherwise, any term of office that is sufficient for reasonable medium- to long-term planning is also sufficient to allow serious damage to be done with relative impunity if the wrong person won the election but the voters only learn that after the fact.
As a side benefit, this also balances the tendency for major elections to be fought on a tiny number of headline issues, with little if any incentive to represent the electorate's interests in all the other significant-but-not-dominant areas, because if you annoy too many small groups of the population, collectively they can become powerful enough to trigger a vote.
I don't think your version of "serious damage" from this issue matches most voters. Even if this were a parliamentary system where sufficient public outcry could force new elections, or a "do over" recall was available (a terrible flaw in the state constitutions where it exists, IMHO), you'd still not be getting the U.S. administration you seem to want. You need to convince the public and then win elections, that's how change happens.
This lack of direct motivation is a systemic weakness in almost any electoral system that involves fixed terms of significant length, and it applies more generally than just the need to choose appropriate subordinates. What you described just happens to be one ineffective case that is relevant to the current discussion.
Look at it this way: how much do you think the average person would pay to get rid of the NSA program?[1] You think it's anywhere near how much money is on the line from Medicare/Social Security/tax policy choices? Or heck, even so-called "wedge issues" like gay rights or abortion rights?
[1] This is, of course, one easy way of valuing the negative utility of any given thing, by asking how much people would pay to avoid it.