this is an individual who is probably forgotten at the time of his death. he spoke at the eagle forum leadership summit in washington, d.c.. this is about a half an hour. >> we have a very exciting afternoon. and we are going to lead with the wonderful author named andrew mccarthy has written faithless execution building the political case for obama's

impeachment. he's a best-selling author at the national review institute and contributing editor at the national review. he's also director for the curriculum. he was best known in the 1993 world trade center bombing after the 9/11 attacks. other works include a memoir of the jihad. how islam and the west, sabotage america and springfield are the or the illusion of democracy. please welcome andrew mccarthy. [applause] spank thank you so much for having me here today. it's always be great to be at

the hall. this is more like a home game for me. it's great to be here. as you might imagine i've gotten some flak over the book and in particular of the subtitle of the book called faithless execution and it's building the place for obama's impeachment. so naturally the word everybody focuses on you have this crazy juxtaposition of the progressive law professors who were called as witnesses and the hearing was about the presidential

lawlessness. one of the law professors called it the uber presidency. eventually obama is the president nixon always wanted to be said that is the tenor of what you're getting and we have republican and conservative. they would run under their desk every time the word impeachment was mentioned. one congresswoman who. and he turned as one of the remedies to rein in the lawlessness immersed in of framers of the constitution.

if you're going to have a constitution he have to. that is a thought that we don't even want to have up here. so i think it's actually some progress that we have had in the last six months. now it's actually out in polite conversation. i wouldn't say with questions in the point. but again it's entering the space it off to have been all along which is as a real remedies they were most worried about the cover of the runaway presidency. the problem or the potential danger of a lawless presidency.

the dreamers having lived under the articles of confederation and having tried to do national security by the committee realized that was one i was one of the biggest flaws in the article and one of the things they wanted to defend the constitution is create an executive branch that is capable of protecting the country and executing the law but they recognize any presidency that was so powerful it could summon up the amount. amber at the time of the founding unlike today they very much recognized they could be conquered. this was a brand-new country and it wasn't clear how things would go. so they understood that to create that kind of powerful

office you need to create a great potential danger which is if those powers fell into that. they decided that it was indispensable in madison words to have an impeachment remedy in the constitution. something that would congress a meaningful check on the possibility that the executive branch would fall into the wrong hands. what is the only check come in because the president wants the executive branch and he would get involved in that so if you took the possibility that you could always prosecute the

subordinates coupled with the possibility that they could vote the president out if he did anything egregious enough to warrant it they thought maybe it wasn't necessary. a veteran of tv a minority position because as people like medicine push back and said they president it is apt to be corrupt would be most apt to be corrupt and getting himself reelected us of according to the sufficient just to rely on the ballot box. there's two other remedies. one is impeachment i will get to in a second and the other is the power of the purse. that is the power that the framers really thought the congress with most often rely on not only all expenditures of the public money but also all expenditures of the executive

branch so that if the president exceeded his authority they could either cut off the money that he was using to the agencies that exceeded his authority or if one was needed you could/the budget much more dramatically but the idea would be that the president had to look to the congress for the is to carry out his agenda and he overstepped his bounds that congress would be able to on that and finally impeachment would be the ultimate ability to remove someone who was suited for the position. when they were discussing this, the two things they were concerned about where the number one that there would be a very clear legal standard for what was required and second that it

would be hard to do. they didn't want impeachment could be done frivolously or an exercise in partisan or ideological hacking. they wanted to make sure that if a president was going to be removed it would be the consensus of the american people who would want him out of power. to take and to take on those missions and make it hard to do as far as the standard is concerned, they adopted a british term of art high crimes and misdemeanors. people hear crimes investigators to think of the offenses of the penal code adults with when i was a prosecutor put the tying has little to do with it. crimes and misdemeanors can be

in violation of the law but it's more than that. as hamilton put it with high crimes and misdemeanors refers to is that they meant to convey great breaches of the public trust for the high executive branch officials and none higher than the president. much more than the penal code the concept is more readily available in the code of justice. concepts like the dereliction of duty, the thing they were mainly concerned about is the president's obligation to uphold rhetoric and undermine. the president is the only official required in our government to take the oath to

preserve, protect and defend the united constitution so they thought that was very paramount in terms of what the president's responsibilities were so the idea of those responsibilities and public trust would qualify as a high crime misdemeanor. the president as the commander in chief has committed a high crime and misdemeanor. a president who misleads congress has created a high crime misdemeanor. a president that defrauds the president of the united states commits a high crime misdemeanor so that's what the concept was. it takes him an awful lot of

potential misconduct by the president so they wanted to make sure that you had what was really significant from the things that were frivolous or not a great moment. the second condition was the notion that in order to remove the president who can be impeached which is an accusation from the simple majority a simple majority vote of the house of representatives but to remove the president from power requires a two thirds vote in the senate and that was done to make certain if you ever did remove a president from power it would be because there was a broad consensus in the group to take a population. it wouldn't be enough that one fraction of the political party came out. it would have to be something egregious enough to make the

public convince we can no longer go by having the presidency in this particular individual who ever it was at the time. my book is about trying to explain what it is how it came to be and why we have a stake in it. the second is in the way the prosecutor read the indictment. the second half reads like a diamond i might have written when i was a prosecutor. >> to think about the second half the most important aspect

is to try to explain why we all have a stake in the presidential lawlessness and this shouldn't be a conservative versus liberal we don't want to live in the republic where every time one party is in power the other is trying to figure out how to impeach him and even though we have only had three episodes of impeachment in the history of the country, to formal impeachment but were unsuccessful and president nixon who re-signed to stave off a certain impeachment you would not know that from living in our politicized era where between what happened in the clinton administration and what was discussed during the bush administration and we are seeing the impeachment is it seems to

be in the air. we don't want that kind of a society. the reason it's important for people to understand why they have a stake in it is president obama has systematically attacked the framework of the country beginning with not executing the will faithfully. the problem and that is the precedent he's setting now will be achievable to every future president regardless of party if we want to remain a public of the law and we want to remain a people that considers itself governed under the rule of law rather than subjects of presidential when everybody has a stake in cracking down and trying to get our president the

inducement to abide by his oath and execute faithfully. >> let's take some questions. >> link lincoln carper from st. louis missouri. i have a lot of friends you could say on the far right of things as soon as barack obama was we have to talk about impeachment but the main thing i found which is just looking at impeachment is the feasibility problem like how feasible is it we could go through a process that as you said has never been brought to fruition in the united states with president obama so i was wondering if you could speak to the visibility and is it a fight worth fighting? >> it's never been brought fully

to fruition but let's talk about when it was and isn't. richard nixon in november 1972 was elected with the second largest electoral landslide in the history of presidential politics. it dwarfs president barack obama's victory by millions of votes and percentage in the electoral college. months later he was gone and that was because he could not survive politically once the country was riveted to wall with this on the executive branch. very different role in the media in 1972 it was the day after they prosecutor and they have a different relationship where it

is more protected and prosecuted but political conditions can change and have changed. look what happened to the president's popularity polls in just the last few months. politics is dynamic. could you ever impeach this president? is a realistic possibility even if the republicans were to take control of the senate in november this president could be impeached? i doubt it. if the republicans when win they will have a margin of one or two ago seats in terms of majority view to extending 15, 17 democrats to vote which means there would have to be massive public pressure and people would have to be so greedy as something or everything under the presidency that they would like a fire under democrats that

could get them to move the president but that isn't likely. people get ahead of themselves if they say we have to go from pretty much doing nothing which is what the opposition has done the last five and a half years to the circumstances where there isn't a political role right now. you could be motivated to crack down on the lawlessness but you have to impeach him just say because the republicans have the margin so they voted articles of impeachment and it goes immediately to the senate where obama wins its governed the last five or six years so you would have cracked down and ended up encouraging it so there's a big step to get from here to there and the biggest tip is create a climate in the president

interests to be lawful and abide by his oath and there's a lot of ways to do that including not only cutting the money but you can also impeach subordinate officials. you could start with the irs. there's a lot to be done but to cultivate a climate of law to be cut lifeless ms.. >> there were other questions bring back their. >> thank you for being here today. i was wondering if you could share your thoughts on how the statements can be reconciled with the responsibility requirements to basically execute the laws of the country. >> that's a great question. the president has no obligation to execute the law that he has a

good faith belief is unconstitutional. they were were very worried about the effectiveness effect of this and if you read the federalist papers they were afraid of the propensity of congress to use the power of the other branches so be an act meant by congress that tried to take away the presidential power as it was laid out in the constitution so this is a battle that goes on and one response is presidential signing statements. i think they were unfortunate in the sense that it's not so much the problem is that they take the position that it's unconstitutional because let's face it they scooped the laws enacted by the multi-managers and unusual. the reason that signing statements have become common place is because legislation is so big now instead of getting

what we ought to have addressed by the legislation so you write a book so everybody knows what the law is and it is either signed or not signed by the president i think it's fair to say either veto it or sign it but don't tell us about it. do one or the other. now some of them are in the thousands of pages and a delegate so much authority that that they result in tens the resulting tens of thousands of pages of regulations. there's a lot in the bills that we need and want to suspect. it's natural for a president to say i am i'm signing this because we need xyz but if this person is an issue that is unconstitutional and i will not feel down about it. it's more of a reaction to something that's even worse. >> another question.

>> what is the worst crime? >> i am of two minds of that. one is very difficult to have a defense to and prosecutors think if the jury gets used as a guilty they will say it a lot so you want one count that is pretty bulletproof and attorney that would be the failure to execute the law faithfully. even the most ardent admirers would have to concede that he doesn't follow federal law. the main defense they never say that he's executing it faithfully and i laid out numerous instances of his own obamacare law that is the

signature legislative accomplishment. i think that he had intended it 36 times. i haven't checked since i've gotten here so i think that one is pretty strong but the one that offends me the most enough to be offensive to the country is the massacre that i don't consider as just something that happened september 11 of 2012. in the book i go back to the war the president started under false pretenses without congress shall authorization against the regime that was being held as a counter to this and now i of the united states because they were giving us intelligence on the jihad in places like benghazi.

the president purported to be operating under a un mandate but that only called for the protection of civilians and used it as a pretext. he followed this up and this is really frightening with months of not providing adequate security for u.s. officials who were assigned to benghazi it was one of the leading points for the jihad is who went to iraq to make more on the troops. every other country had a good sense to reduce or pull their people out if they were foolish enough to have them there in the first place. we continue to provide hours of

inadequate security and then reduce even after the installation after september 11, 2012 was bombed in the late spring. that leads you to inevitably september 11 where active stay we knew in the attack it was a terrorist attack and americans were under siege. we don't have accounting of where he was that night but we know he was in the situation room where a president is supposed to be when directing operations against an enemy but we do know no meaningful action was taken under the circumstances there was an attack against americans and we also know they started to get the story straight about what they were going to say at 10:00

at night it's the first indication we get from the government that they will start blaming the video for what happened. at 10:00 they were still alive and fighting for their lives yet no action was taken to try to respond and rescue. that is for what abide this preposterous story of the video caused the attack and the cherry on top of that fraud as it were is that they trump up the prosecution against the producer of the video which is held out to the american audience as additional proof the video caused the massacre and held out muslim countries as evidence the united states could use to sharia blasphemy standards. if you take the transaction from beginning to end to get all of the fraud, lawlessness, abuse and power that's become the

glorious for. >> thank you very much kevin. [applause]

is .. discipline mary frances berry coming in your book you write that most black americans have always been more american than white americans. sb two it is sort of like being more catholic than the pope. believing more in the values and principles that are laid out in the declaration of independence and in the preamble to the constitution . and