Talk of Watergate and impeachment is again in the air in Washington, triggered by President Barack Obama's blatant and willful violation of the War Powers Resolution, and of the U.S. Constitution itself, with his Libyan War adventure. As Lyndon LaRouche has put it, Watergate II is in process.
It's not only Libya. Another potentially major vulnerability for Obama, is the disclosure that the Democratic National Committee held a meeting with top Wall Street campaign donors in the White House March 7, in possible violation of the prohibition against using government facilities for campaign fundraising. And, as EIR has reported ("Obama: Worse than Bush and Cheney," EIR, May 27, 2011), in addition to Obama's flaunting of the War Powers Resolution, he has also exceeded the abuses of the Bush-Cheney regime in the sphere of domestic surveillance targeting U.S. citizens, and in the arbitrary use of executive power.
A senior U.S. intelligence source with close ties to the Obama White House was blunt: "President Obama is in violation of the War Powers Act and the Federal Constitution. His argument that the U.S. military involvement in Libya is a 'humanitarian intervention' is an evasion. The United States, as of last week, had spent $718 million on the Libya military operation. By next week, the amount will have passed $1 billion." He added that, without direct U.S. military involvement, NATO would be unable to carry out the Libya operations. "Seventy-five percent of all NATO operations involve U.S. capabilities. Without the U.S., the NATO military operation cannot be sustained."
The source emphasized that the Obama White House arrogantly misread the situation in Congress, anticipating that a bipartisan non-binding resolution by Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) would allow the President to bypass the War Powers Act requirements. But a June 5 Washington Post op-ed by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put the fundamental Constitutional issues so squarely on the table, that McCain and Kerry withdrew their draft resolution of support for the Libya mission. That helped spark the bipartisan revolt that is now evident, seen in the passage of Rep. Brad Sherman's (D-Calif.) amendment barring any funding of the Libya mission, and in the bipartisan Federal lawsuit against Obama, filed on June 15, to bar the President from continuing the Libya War, on the grounds that it violates Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants to Congress the sole authority to declare war.
