Impeachment Hearings: House Judiciary Committee, July 30, 1974 (1/2)
Impeachment Hearings: House Judiciary Committee, July 30, 1974 (1/2)
[00.06.59] Mr. SEIBERLING. I would just like to point out that every time this has come up in the past, Presidents starting with George Washington and going through to Franklin Roosevelt have conceded that in an impeachment inquiry the House can obtain whatever information the executive branch possesses. I would just like to read you what a House, committee said back in 1843 when President Tyler, after initially objecting, finally turned over to the, committee some materials that they had requested. If the House possesses the power to Impeach, it must Likewise possess all the incidents of that power-the power to compel the attendance of all witnesses and the production of all such papers as may be considered necessary to prove the charges on which impeachment is founded, If it did not, the power of impeachment conferred upon it by the Constitution would be nugatory. It could not exercise it with effect. Three years later President Polk made this statement: It may be alleged that the power of impeachment belongs to the House of Representatives, and that, with a view to the exercise of this power, that House has the right to investigate the conduct of all public officers under the Government is cheerfully admitted. In such a case the safety of the Republic be the supreme law, and the power of the House in the pursuit of this object would penetrate into the most secret recesses of the Executive Department. It could command the attendance of any and every agent of Government and compel them to produce all papers, public or private, official or unofficial, and to testify on oath to all facts within their knowledge. . . . If the House of Representatives, as the grand inquest of the nation, should at any time have reason to believe that there has been malversation in office by an improper use or application of the public money by a public officer, and should think proper to institute an inquiry into the matter, all the archives and papers of the Executive Departments, public or private, would be subject to inspection and control of a Committee of their body and every facility in the power of the Executive be afforded to enable them to prosecute the investigation. Now, the Supreme Court last week held that in a Presidential case, the President's power to withhold documents, his power of executive privilege must yield to the legitimate requirements of proof in a court case. If that is true in a criminal case involving third parties, how much more so is it true in an impeachment investigation, investigating the very conduct of the President himself; Lord Coke has said "This King cannot be judge of his own cause," and yet if a President can withhold the key evidence from a committee investigating his conduct of his office, he in effect has become the judge in his own cause. We do not need to submit this to court. We have the power as acknowledged by Presidents in the past and we should exercise that power, and the only effective way we can exercise it, when a President refuses to respond to our subpenas, is to include that as one of the impeachable offenses and give the Senate, as the court of ultimate resort, the right to pass on that offense. The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman has consumed 5 minutes. Mr. WIGGINS. Mr. Chairman? The CHAIRMAN. I recognize the gentleman from California, Mr. Wiggins. Mr. WIGGINS. I thank the chairman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment. The maker of the, main position, you see, has dug himself a hole and the purpose of the amendment is to help extricate himself from that illogical position. The situation is this. This committee yesterday and the day before viewed the evidence and found it, I am told, overwhelming. I believe our good counsel called it a surfeit of evidence. I take that to be a good bit, Mr. Doar. And voted to impeach and remove the President based thereon, found it to be clear and convincing. And now we seek to impeach him because he did not give us enough evidence to do the job. Now. I would think that you have an option here, if you wish. Yon' can frankly acknowledge. the inadequacy of the evidence to impeach the President and perhaps impeach him for failing to provide that evidence, or on the other hand, you can vote that the evidence is sufficient to impeach the 'President as you have done and to recognize that the matters subpenaed were not in fact necessary to the conduct of this committee's inquiry. That word "necessary" is important. you understand because that" word is found in the authorizing resolution which gives its the power to issue subpenas at all. We made a tentative judgment as to necessity when we authorized the subpenas, but by your vote yesterday and The day before, you conclusively demonstrated that it was not necessary. Mr. McCLORY. Would the gentleman yield? Mr. WIGGINS. I will in a moment but not, until I am prepared to do so. Mr. McCLORY. All right. Mr. WIGGINS. NOW, look at the Thornton amendment in terms of what it does to Mr. McClory's amendment. Mr. McCLORY's amendment says that the matters were necessary, deemed necessary, to deter whether sufficient grounds exist to impeach Richard Nixon. manifestly that is not so or your votes were improper. Recognizing that, I suspect my friend from Arkansas has proposed a perfecting amendment in which he says there were conflicts in the evidence and the subpenaed material was desirable, perhaps not necessary, but desirable, to resolve the conflicts. Well, that may be so, but you understand your vote yesterday and the day before indicated a positive resolution of those conflicts. They no longer are unresolved. Now, if logic and -common sense still has any place to play in these proceedings, I would think that we had an election. We elect to impeach on the basis of the evidence before us or we elect to impeach him for failing to provide that evidence. Those who voted for the first two articles cannot have, their- cake and eat it, too, and maintain logical consistency by voting for the third, in my opinion. In my opinion, this article is inconsistent with the prior two. I will be happy to yield to my friend from Illinois. [00.13.52]