Photo Credit: GARY LOCKE

But there is a fifth recourse, which the new Republican Congress might consider in view of President Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal immigrants: the power to censure. In fact, censure could work in tandem with Congress’s other powers, helping the legislature make the moral case for responding to the president’s lawlessness.
Presidential censure is a rare occurrence. Most notably, in 1834, the Whig-controlled Senate censured President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, for moving federal deposits from the Second Bank of the United States to local banks, derisively called his “pets” because most were operated by loyal Democrats.

Jackson’s legal justification was dubious at best. Under the law, only the secretary of the Treasury could initiate such a transfer, and then only if the funds were deemed insecure. But the Bank had been impeccably run since Nicholas Biddle became its president in 1822. An investigation had ascertained that the funds were perfectly safe, and the House had voted overwhelmingly to affirm that fact. Treasury Secretary William Duane, moreover, refused to remove the money or to step down so Jackson could install somebody who would. Jackson fired Duane, replacing him with Roger Taney without Senate confirmation. Taney’s cronies would go on to grossly mismanage funds in Jackson’s pet bank in Baltimore.

This series of actions added up to a severe presidential encroachment. So the Senate—led by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster—censured Jackson by passing this resolution: “Resolved, That the President, in the late Executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation
of both.”

The censure wounded the president’s bountiful pride, so much so that in 1837, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, a fierce Jackson loyalist, had the resolution stricken from the record.

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Photo Credit: AP

On Monday night, the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri freed Officer Darren Wilson from the possibility of indictment over his shooting of 18-year-old black man Michael Brown. The prosecutor before the grand jury, Robert McCulloch, explained why the indictment had been rejected: the evidence, both physical and eyewitness, supported Wilson’s case that he had acted in self-defense.

McCulloch added pointed criticism of the media that drove the case in the first place, ripping the “insatiable appetite” of social media and “non-stop rumors” driven by it. The initial accounts pushed by social media, McCulloch said, were “filled with speculation and little, if any, solid or accurate evidence.” But he saved his harshest criticism for the media machine itself: “The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything, to talk about, followed closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media.” McCulloch finished by stating that evidence mattered, and that no one’s life should be decided based on “public outcry or for political expediency.”

The lecture was well-deserved.

Just as the media did during the George Zimmerman trial and in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin, the media attempted to cram the square peg of the Wilson-Brown shooting into the round hole of white police racism. That meant portraying Brown as the latest sainted racial victim; this time, rather than the Trayvon Martin narrative of hoodies, Skittles, and iced tea, the media hit upon the notion that Brown was a “gentle giant.” The Brown family, Al Sharpton, MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets ran with the story that Brown was a “gentle giant” who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Then, it turned out that Brown had robbed a convenience store minutes before his altercation with Wilson.

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Photo Credit: AP

By Robert Wilde.

In a statement released Monday night, the American Civil Liberties Union affirmed their belief that police are not entitled to fair and just treatment under the law.

Despite the fact that a grand jury spent months evaluating vast amounts of evidence, listened to three coroners’ autopsy reports, and examined myriad ballistic reports and witness testimonies, the ACLU condemned the grand jury’s conclusion not to indict Darren Wilson for the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The ACLU asserted in a statement delivered by Jeffery Mittman, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, that Brown’s death is part of an “alarming national trend of officers using excessive force against people of color, often during routine encounters.”

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