Radio show
Alan Keyes' radio show, "America's Wake-Up Call"
January 6, 1999[Partial transcript]
Dr. Keyes: Welcome to America's Wake-Up Call. What's the GOOD NEWS today?
Well, let me tell you, from our point of view, the best news of the day is that we are now officially live and on board with the stations of the Catholic Family Radio Network. They have started carrying the program, and I want to welcome these stations to The Alan Keyes Show family. Welcome to America's Wake-Up Call. Yes! (soundbite of applause)
It's a special word of welcome to our new station in Los Angeles, California, am 830 KTLS. Our station in Chicago, Illinois, am 930 WAUR. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, am 1590 WPWA. Minneapolis, Minnesota, am 1280 WWTC. And Denver, Colorado back with us, am 1340 KKYD. And I also hope that everybody out there, if you know folks who are in these locales, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Denver, let them know that the Alan Keyes Show is on the air, because I know from the communications that I get from folks, and as I travel around the country, people are always asking where they can pick up the program, and as we expand our reach, I think it's a good idea to let folks know, who might be interested.
Welcome to the show, and welcome back to Impeachment Trial Central here on the Alan Keyes Show. I mean, the papers and everything else filled with the story of the impeachment, impending impeachment trial of President Clinton. And as things look now, the formal opening of the trial will be, according to the things that I've been reading, on Thursday- -that is tomorrow. The gavel will fall, the Senators will be sworn in, and I would hope that as that is done folks will focus, as I believe they should, on the fact that the loose talk that's been going on in which the Senate has been acting as if it is simply the master of this stage of the process, that that loose talk will stop and that people will take a careful look at the real Constitution.
And in point of fact, it would have been absurd for the Founders to allow the Senate to be the master of this process, since it is a process that in some instances would involve a potentially adversarial relationship, by the way, between the Senate and the House. And to make the Senate the judge in its own cause in such an adversarial relationship would have been a grave error, and certainly would be an error now.
And the Founders didn't make that mistake. Knowing that this would be an issue in which the most delicate and important interests would be involved on the part of the Senate, on the part of the House, in which strong passions would be involved, in which partisan passions would be inflamed, and knowing as well that there would be an important personal interest on the part of the Chief Executive Officer of the nation, they understood that what was required in this situation would be a guide for the process who would be in a position where that guide could be free of the partisan passion and of the political interests and of the personal sense of jeopardy, and so forth and so on, and able to lend to the process a judgment that would not be biased by all of these concerns. They understood that the moment of an impeachment trial was going to be a moment that would have grave implications for the safety and peace and stability of this Republic.
I think if you look at the debates in the Constitutional Convention and at the way in which this was handled- -on the one hand there was a pretty general assumption amongst the people who sat at the Constitutional Convention that if you were going to have a strong, effective Executive at the national level, then you would have to have an impeachment process that would hold that Executive personally accountable. They were not entertaining a system such as that in Great Britain, where the executive, the king, would be above the law, and the king could do no wrong, and you couldn't hold him personally accountable for what they did. No. That wasn't on anybody's mind, really.
But they also understood that the impeachment power could be abused to destroy the balance of power between the separate branches of government, and that if that happened, you'd get a legislative tyranny that could destroy the effectiveness and energy of the federal government, and they didn't want to see that happen. So they knew that this was a dangerous, a delicate moment, in which a tool that was at one and the same time indispensable to safety could also be very threatening to the safety and stability of the Republic.
And so what did they do to try to put a check on the dangerous tendencies, while at the same time guaranteeing that the people and the Republic would benefit from the necessary action to correct an abusive executive? What did they do? Well, I think what they did was to give a key role to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the most eminent jurist in the country, the individual who would be in a position where independence and integrity, as well as knowledge, by the way, of the Constitution, of its principles and operations, that that individual would be put in a position where he or she would be personally responsible for the integrity of this process.
Not, by the way, responsible on behalf of the Supreme Court. That is not the case in this process. The Chief Justice's role here is a role that he has personally, not a role that the court has. And he is not exercising this role on behalf of the Supreme Court. In fact, Hamilton, I think in Federalist 65, makes it very clear that they considered the possibility of uniting the court and the Senate as a court of impeachment, and they rejected it. And they not do that. There were certain advantages they saw in it. They thought the disadvantages outweighed the advantages, and they rejected the alternative. That's what he says there.
That being the case, though, they thought they could get some of the necessary advantages by making the Chief Justice the presiding officer over the trial. Now there are some people in this country who are trying to present this as if the Senate just merrily deals with this as if it is another legislative issue put before them, and the Chief Justice then comes over and takes the place of the Vice-President as President of the Senate, a legislative body. That is not true.
And, you can see by reading the Founders, that they used their language carefully, and they referred to this activity on the part of the Senate as a "court of impeachment." They explicitly rejected the idea of setting up a permanent court of impeachment, and they instead had the Senate in a position where, from time to time, as occasion made it necessary, they would become a court of impeachment. And they laid down certain conditions- -one key condition being that the Senators would individually be on oath or affirmation. But in the case of the President, they also put in another extremely important condition, that when they sit as a court of impeachment, when they are sitting in judgment of the President, in the trial of a President for impeachment, the Chief Justice presides.
And he does not preside over the Senate as a legislative body. This is nonsense. He presides over the Senate as a court of impeachment. His court, by the way. In other words, he's the presiding judge, the Senate is for this purpose his court, and he presides over this court with the responsibilities which the presiding judge has in any court room, to make sure that things are conducted in a way that is conformable to law and to equity and to the requirements both of the Constitution and of fairness to the defendant and to those who are aggrieved, who are bringing the charges. That's what the Chief Justice is going to have to do here.
And I am taking pains to explain this, because you know, in a certain sense, and the Founders were clear about this. In a situation like this, the Chief Justice is actually in a very critical position- -but he's not necessarily in a position where the public, you and I, are going to understand what he's supposed to do. Unlike Senators and Congressmen, he doesn't go out and campaign. He doesn't have a base of public support. And so there might be a tendency in the general public in this country to misunderstand the role of the Chief Justice and not to give appropriate respect and support to what he has to do.
I believe that that would be fatal to the integrity of this process. We should understand and appreciate and support the role that the Chief Justice has to play in this process, and we should understand that that role comes directly from the Constitution. He is not subject in that role to the authority of the Senate. He gets his chairmanship, his role, his position as presiding judge directly from the Constitution. They cannot remove him. And since they can't remove him, by the way, at the end of the day, they can't overrule his judgments, either. There are people who have argued that the Senate, with a simple majority vote, can overrule and overturn the judgments of the presiding judge in a Court of Impeachment for the President. I don't see how this is possible, because at the end of the day, the right to overturn the rulings of the chair comes in any given body or meeting from the fact that that body or meeting can remove the chairman. The Senate cannot remove the Chief Justice from the chair, so he can persist in his opinion and conduct the situation as he sees fit, and they can't do anything about it.
(commercial break)
Dr. Keyes: Welcome back to America's Wake-Up Call. Let's get back to the phones. We're going to go to a caller from Cottondale, Florida.
Caller: Alan, I was listening to what you were speaking to, and it's exactly in line with my question. So the only part now I would like for you to explain is what the devil are these people doing, like Dole and the rest of them, going around trying to set up deals when they're not supposed to be even be addressing this situation?
Dr. Keyes: Yeah, this is something that I ask myself. If you think about where we are in this process, right, essentially the charges have been brought, and they have been laid really before the presiding judge, who now has to start the trial. All of these people are acting as if this case has already gone to the jury. It hasn't even been held yet, right?
Caller: Correct.
Dr. Keyes: So why would the jury, in this case the Senate, be talking about making deals and coming to conclusions, and all of this garbage, when the case isn't even before them yet?
Caller: Exactly.
Dr. Keyes: And I find it appalling, all of the junk and the loose talk and the maneuvering that's been going on, which has no basis whatsoever in their Constitutional role. Properly speaking, right now their Constitutional role is to listen to the presentation and the facts, and so forth and so on. Now I do have to point out, though, that along those lines there will come a moment in this process when the whole thing is in the hands of the Senate, right? And when, in point of fact, the Senate will once again also be wholly in charge of its own business. When it deliberates in this instance as a kind of jury, at that point, the Chief Justice is no longer in the same position, is he, because he presides over the trial but does he preside over the jury's deliberations? No judge presides over the jury's deliberations, right?
Caller: Right.
Dr. Keyes: At that point, the Senators will be free to express their views and come up with alternatives and if they at that point want to make dirty little deals in order to come to some conclusion, I suppose we won't be able to do anything about it except lament the fact that they don't have any integrity. But truth is, at this stage of the game, they're just playing unconstitutional games. And they ought to have patience, wait, and cooperate with the proper Constitutional process.
Caller: Well, it seems to me that surely they know this up there, they're not stupid people. We didn't send them up there to be stupid. Surely they know what the Constitution is. Don't they understand what their role is as far as a jury is concerned?
Dr. Keyes: Well, I have to tell you, in all fairness, and I'm not sure what I'm about to say is very complimentary, but it is said in defense of some of these people. I do not believe that in some cases it is malice or stupidity. I think it is just plain ignorance. They do not know. In the early stages of this process, for instance, I was very appalled because they were all talking about impeachment as if it meant removal. And then they finally started to get that straight and to distinguish between the impeachment power of the House and the actual trial and conviction which leads to removal. It took a long time, but I think on the part of some it was actual ignorance. Right now, for instance, you have a lot of folks out there, and they say that in order to convict, you have to have 67 votes. That's not true, by the way. And if you read the Constitution, the Constitution says 2/3 vote of the members present. And that is actually not even present in voting or anything like that. It's just members present.
Caller: When the vote comes up.
Dr. Keyes: When the vote comes up. So if there were ten people present when the vote was taken, then 2/3 of that ten would be sufficient to remove the President.
Caller: Wouldn't that be something?
Dr. Keyes: Now that was, I think, put that way in order to guarantee that everybody who had an interest would show up, so that they wouldn't feel that they could boycott the process and somehow sabotage the effort just by staying away. But if you look at that carefully, there's a lot of loose talk out there giving people the wrong impression. The media and everybody else giving people the impression in order to do this you've got to have 67 votes. No, you don't. Because if only 90 people showed up, you wouldn't need 67 votes. You'd only need 60 votes. You understand what I'm saying? So they don't read the document carefully. A lot of them haven't spent much time reflecting on how it was put together, what principles it's based on, all of this kind of stuff, It's all new to them, and so I wouldn't write it down to stupidity necessarily. I think there's ignorance that then has to be remedied.
Caller: I'm hoping that somebody will get to them and make them understand before they get involved in this, because if they go through with it the way they're looking at it, it'll be against the Constitution.
Dr. Keyes: Well, I would argue, and I'm not sure whether everyone agrees, and of course I can't be sure at all whether the Chief Justice agrees, but I think that that is in part his role. In other words, he's the most eminent jurist in the country, supposed to have the knowledge of the Constitution and the law, and the procedures that prevail in courts and that are fair to people and so forth. It is his job, in point of fact, to make sure that the people in the Senate who might not understand all of these things understand what the Constitution says, understand what it implies, understand what the requirements are of a fair trial and of proper legal procedures, that's his job as it is the job of a presiding judge in any case. And I hope he will do that job, not act on the presumption that Senators know what they're doing. They don't know what they're doing.
Caller: Well they've met with him, and yet they come out of that meeting and they go right back to doing what they were doing. So undoubtedly he hasn't said anything to them in reference to that.
Dr. Keyes: Well, I'm not sure. It could be that they are ignoring his prerogatives, you never know. It could be that he has not asserted himself because in point of fact he understands that until the trial begins, until he actually convenes it he is not acting as presiding judge except in prospect. He might have that view.
Caller: God willing, he'll come down on it, then.
Dr. Keyes: But at the same time it might also be, because the Founders did point out that the Judiciary is, in terms of its base of support, the weakest branch of government, right? And the Chief Justice is somebody who, apart from those who follow things on the Supreme Court, I'll bet he's one of those people that people don't even know his name. Sad to say in this country, even though he occupies such a critically important position.
Caller: Most of them don't know their Representative's name.
Dr. Keyes: That being the case, if in an imprudent way he provokes a big confrontation with the Legislative Branch, who's likely to win? They are. Even though he might be right and he might have the Constitutional authority. So I think it's important that we start to improve our own understanding so that there will be Americans who understand the role he's supposed to play, and who will, if push comes to shove, back him up in making sure that this process is conducted with integrity, and that's what I'm trying to do right now.
Caller: Very good point, Alan.
Dr. Keyes: Thank you, appreciate it very much.
Well, let me tell you, from our point of view, the best news of the day is that we are now officially live and on board with the stations of the Catholic Family Radio Network. They have started carrying the program, and I want to welcome these stations to The Alan Keyes Show family. Welcome to America's Wake-Up Call. Yes! (soundbite of applause)
It's a special word of welcome to our new station in Los Angeles, California, am 830 KTLS. Our station in Chicago, Illinois, am 930 WAUR. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, am 1590 WPWA. Minneapolis, Minnesota, am 1280 WWTC. And Denver, Colorado back with us, am 1340 KKYD. And I also hope that everybody out there, if you know folks who are in these locales, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Denver, let them know that the Alan Keyes Show is on the air, because I know from the communications that I get from folks, and as I travel around the country, people are always asking where they can pick up the program, and as we expand our reach, I think it's a good idea to let folks know, who might be interested.
Welcome to the show, and welcome back to Impeachment Trial Central here on the Alan Keyes Show. I mean, the papers and everything else filled with the story of the impeachment, impending impeachment trial of President Clinton. And as things look now, the formal opening of the trial will be, according to the things that I've been reading, on Thursday
And in point of fact, it would have been absurd for the Founders to allow the Senate to be the master of this process, since it is a process that in some instances would involve a potentially adversarial relationship, by the way, between the Senate and the House. And to make the Senate the judge in its own cause in such an adversarial relationship would have been a grave error, and certainly would be an error now.
And the Founders didn't make that mistake. Knowing that this would be an issue in which the most delicate and important interests would be involved on the part of the Senate, on the part of the House, in which strong passions would be involved, in which partisan passions would be inflamed, and knowing as well that there would be an important personal interest on the part of the Chief Executive Officer of the nation, they understood that what was required in this situation would be a guide for the process who would be in a position where that guide could be free of the partisan passion and of the political interests and of the personal sense of jeopardy, and so forth and so on, and able to lend to the process a judgment that would not be biased by all of these concerns. They understood that the moment of an impeachment trial was going to be a moment that would have grave implications for the safety and peace and stability of this Republic.
I think if you look at the debates in the Constitutional Convention and at the way in which this was handled
But they also understood that the impeachment power could be abused to destroy the balance of power between the separate branches of government, and that if that happened, you'd get a legislative tyranny that could destroy the effectiveness and energy of the federal government, and they didn't want to see that happen. So they knew that this was a dangerous, a delicate moment, in which a tool that was at one and the same time indispensable to safety could also be very threatening to the safety and stability of the Republic.
And so what did they do to try to put a check on the dangerous tendencies, while at the same time guaranteeing that the people and the Republic would benefit from the necessary action to correct an abusive executive? What did they do? Well, I think what they did was to give a key role to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the most eminent jurist in the country, the individual who would be in a position where independence and integrity, as well as knowledge, by the way, of the Constitution, of its principles and operations, that that individual would be put in a position where he or she would be personally responsible for the integrity of this process.
Not, by the way, responsible on behalf of the Supreme Court. That is not the case in this process. The Chief Justice's role here is a role that he has personally, not a role that the court has. And he is not exercising this role on behalf of the Supreme Court. In fact, Hamilton, I think in Federalist 65, makes it very clear that they considered the possibility of uniting the court and the Senate as a court of impeachment, and they rejected it. And they not do that. There were certain advantages they saw in it. They thought the disadvantages outweighed the advantages, and they rejected the alternative. That's what he says there.
That being the case, though, they thought they could get some of the necessary advantages by making the Chief Justice the presiding officer over the trial. Now there are some people in this country who are trying to present this as if the Senate just merrily deals with this as if it is another legislative issue put before them, and the Chief Justice then comes over and takes the place of the Vice-President as President of the Senate, a legislative body. That is not true.
And, you can see by reading the Founders, that they used their language carefully, and they referred to this activity on the part of the Senate as a "court of impeachment." They explicitly rejected the idea of setting up a permanent court of impeachment, and they instead had the Senate in a position where, from time to time, as occasion made it necessary, they would become a court of impeachment. And they laid down certain conditions
And he does not preside over the Senate as a legislative body. This is nonsense. He presides over the Senate as a court of impeachment. His court, by the way. In other words, he's the presiding judge, the Senate is for this purpose his court, and he presides over this court with the responsibilities which the presiding judge has in any court room, to make sure that things are conducted in a way that is conformable to law and to equity and to the requirements both of the Constitution and of fairness to the defendant and to those who are aggrieved, who are bringing the charges. That's what the Chief Justice is going to have to do here.
And I am taking pains to explain this, because you know, in a certain sense, and the Founders were clear about this. In a situation like this, the Chief Justice is actually in a very critical position
I believe that that would be fatal to the integrity of this process. We should understand and appreciate and support the role that the Chief Justice has to play in this process, and we should understand that that role comes directly from the Constitution. He is not subject in that role to the authority of the Senate. He gets his chairmanship, his role, his position as presiding judge directly from the Constitution. They cannot remove him. And since they can't remove him, by the way, at the end of the day, they can't overrule his judgments, either. There are people who have argued that the Senate, with a simple majority vote, can overrule and overturn the judgments of the presiding judge in a Court of Impeachment for the President. I don't see how this is possible, because at the end of the day, the right to overturn the rulings of the chair comes in any given body or meeting from the fact that that body or meeting can remove the chairman. The Senate cannot remove the Chief Justice from the chair, so he can persist in his opinion and conduct the situation as he sees fit, and they can't do anything about it.
(commercial break)
Dr. Keyes: Welcome back to America's Wake-Up Call. Let's get back to the phones. We're going to go to a caller from Cottondale, Florida.
Caller: Alan, I was listening to what you were speaking to, and it's exactly in line with my question. So the only part now I would like for you to explain is what the devil are these people doing, like Dole and the rest of them, going around trying to set up deals when they're not supposed to be even be addressing this situation?
Dr. Keyes: Yeah, this is something that I ask myself. If you think about where we are in this process, right, essentially the charges have been brought, and they have been laid really before the presiding judge, who now has to start the trial. All of these people are acting as if this case has already gone to the jury. It hasn't even been held yet, right?
Caller: Correct.
Dr. Keyes: So why would the jury, in this case the Senate, be talking about making deals and coming to conclusions, and all of this garbage, when the case isn't even before them yet?
Caller: Exactly.
Dr. Keyes: And I find it appalling, all of the junk and the loose talk and the maneuvering that's been going on, which has no basis whatsoever in their Constitutional role. Properly speaking, right now their Constitutional role is to listen to the presentation and the facts, and so forth and so on. Now I do have to point out, though, that along those lines there will come a moment in this process when the whole thing is in the hands of the Senate, right? And when, in point of fact, the Senate will once again also be wholly in charge of its own business. When it deliberates in this instance as a kind of jury, at that point, the Chief Justice is no longer in the same position, is he, because he presides over the trial but does he preside over the jury's deliberations? No judge presides over the jury's deliberations, right?
Caller: Right.
Dr. Keyes: At that point, the Senators will be free to express their views and come up with alternatives and if they at that point want to make dirty little deals in order to come to some conclusion, I suppose we won't be able to do anything about it except lament the fact that they don't have any integrity. But truth is, at this stage of the game, they're just playing unconstitutional games. And they ought to have patience, wait, and cooperate with the proper Constitutional process.
Caller: Well, it seems to me that surely they know this up there, they're not stupid people. We didn't send them up there to be stupid. Surely they know what the Constitution is. Don't they understand what their role is as far as a jury is concerned?
Dr. Keyes: Well, I have to tell you, in all fairness, and I'm not sure what I'm about to say is very complimentary, but it is said in defense of some of these people. I do not believe that in some cases it is malice or stupidity. I think it is just plain ignorance. They do not know. In the early stages of this process, for instance, I was very appalled because they were all talking about impeachment as if it meant removal. And then they finally started to get that straight and to distinguish between the impeachment power of the House and the actual trial and conviction which leads to removal. It took a long time, but I think on the part of some it was actual ignorance. Right now, for instance, you have a lot of folks out there, and they say that in order to convict, you have to have 67 votes. That's not true, by the way. And if you read the Constitution, the Constitution says 2/3 vote of the members present. And that is actually not even present in voting or anything like that. It's just members present.
Caller: When the vote comes up.
Dr. Keyes: When the vote comes up. So if there were ten people present when the vote was taken, then 2/3 of that ten would be sufficient to remove the President.
Caller: Wouldn't that be something?
Dr. Keyes: Now that was, I think, put that way in order to guarantee that everybody who had an interest would show up, so that they wouldn't feel that they could boycott the process and somehow sabotage the effort just by staying away. But if you look at that carefully, there's a lot of loose talk out there giving people the wrong impression. The media and everybody else giving people the impression in order to do this you've got to have 67 votes. No, you don't. Because if only 90 people showed up, you wouldn't need 67 votes. You'd only need 60 votes. You understand what I'm saying? So they don't read the document carefully. A lot of them haven't spent much time reflecting on how it was put together, what principles it's based on, all of this kind of stuff, It's all new to them, and so I wouldn't write it down to stupidity necessarily. I think there's ignorance that then has to be remedied.
Caller: I'm hoping that somebody will get to them and make them understand before they get involved in this, because if they go through with it the way they're looking at it, it'll be against the Constitution.
Dr. Keyes: Well, I would argue, and I'm not sure whether everyone agrees, and of course I can't be sure at all whether the Chief Justice agrees, but I think that that is in part his role. In other words, he's the most eminent jurist in the country, supposed to have the knowledge of the Constitution and the law, and the procedures that prevail in courts and that are fair to people and so forth. It is his job, in point of fact, to make sure that the people in the Senate who might not understand all of these things understand what the Constitution says, understand what it implies, understand what the requirements are of a fair trial and of proper legal procedures, that's his job as it is the job of a presiding judge in any case. And I hope he will do that job, not act on the presumption that Senators know what they're doing. They don't know what they're doing.
Caller: Well they've met with him, and yet they come out of that meeting and they go right back to doing what they were doing. So undoubtedly he hasn't said anything to them in reference to that.
Dr. Keyes: Well, I'm not sure. It could be that they are ignoring his prerogatives, you never know. It could be that he has not asserted himself because in point of fact he understands that until the trial begins, until he actually convenes it he is not acting as presiding judge except in prospect. He might have that view.
Caller: God willing, he'll come down on it, then.
Dr. Keyes: But at the same time it might also be, because the Founders did point out that the Judiciary is, in terms of its base of support, the weakest branch of government, right? And the Chief Justice is somebody who, apart from those who follow things on the Supreme Court, I'll bet he's one of those people that people don't even know his name. Sad to say in this country, even though he occupies such a critically important position.
Caller: Most of them don't know their Representative's name.
Dr. Keyes: That being the case, if in an imprudent way he provokes a big confrontation with the Legislative Branch, who's likely to win? They are. Even though he might be right and he might have the Constitutional authority. So I think it's important that we start to improve our own understanding so that there will be Americans who understand the role he's supposed to play, and who will, if push comes to shove, back him up in making sure that this process is conducted with integrity, and that's what I'm trying to do right now.
Caller: Very good point, Alan.
Dr. Keyes: Thank you, appreciate it very much.