As the call for the impeachment against Richard Nixon was reaching its crescendo in the summer of 1974, the three senior Republicans on Capitol Hill paid a visit to the Chief Executive with the bad news: he had to go. Fast forward to present day – Barack Obama may be starting to understand exactly how Nixon felt. As reported by the Breitbart.com news portal and The National Review, some of the heavier hitters in the liberal world are calling Obama on the mat for ostensibly breaking the law with the Taliban-Bergdahl swap.
Two of the more senior US Senators are publicly hammering Obama for failing to adhere to Section 1035(d) of the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, which directs any given Administration Secretary of Defense to “notify the appropriate committees of Congress … not later than 30 days before the transfer or release” of detainees from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.
No one likes being thrown under the proverbial bus, but the buzz inside The Beltway is that Obama sold out his fellow Democrats who work on the opposite side of the Washington Monument when he all-inclusively stated that the Legislative Branch was already in the know. At a presser in Poland, the Commander-in-Chief told the assembled world press, “We have consulted with Congress for quite some time about the possibility that we might need to execute a prisoner exchange in order to recover Bergdahl.” Obama left out that the “consultations” cited were a handful of meetings held in 2011.
Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein (D- Calif) held little back when she told reporters “It comes with some surprise and dismay that the transfers went ahead with no consultation, totally not following the law.” Former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) was also less than thrilled with how the White House has handled the situation: “I don’t like it when the White House says the Intelligence Committees were briefed. Because we weren’t.”
George Washington University Law School professor, self-avowed liberal and long time supporter of Barack Obama, Jonathan Turley, was blunt:
Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be. He’s been allowed to act unilaterally in a way that we fought for so many decades.
The professor added:
Even though one could agree with many of the policies — as I do — that this administration holds, the means that it is selecting are very troubling. This president, once again, has said that he simply chose not to comply with federal law.
The GOP’s turn…
London’s The Daily Mail quoted House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif) and Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla) stating that Obama “clearly violated laws which require him to notify Congress thirty days before any transfer of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, and to explain how the threat posed by such terrorists has been substantially mitigated.”
Party loyalty doesn’t trump being honest…
On Aug. 7, 1974, three die-hard GOP legislators who had spent their entire adult lives as loyal members of the Republican Party informed the President of the United States that it was time for him to step down. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz), Sen. Hugh Scott (R-Penn), and Rep. John Rhodes (R-Ariz) took the short drive to the White House to lay it on the line with President Nixon. For the good of the nation and in the face of incontrovertible evidence of his wrongdoing, the President was informed by the trio that he could either resign from office or face impeachment, conviction and very possibly, imprisonment.
Arguably the visit from the Republican leadership to the Oval Office had an effect. The very next day Richard Milhous Nixon resigned from the Presidency of the United States.