Unpacking the lies All Democracies do it: America, France, Argentina, Brazil By mid-June, the campaign was in full force. Many political science professors and public intellectuals from the opposition including Waheed Abdelmagid and Hasan Naf’ah, as well as constitutional law professors such as Noor Farahat and Husam Issa, were arguing across several television networks that the call for “early presidential elections” was not only an acceptable mechanism available in all democracies, but that it had been used many times before. As examples, they cited Nixon’s resignation in 1974, France’s Charles de Gaulle in 1969, Argentina’s Raúl Alfonsín in 1989, and Brazil’s Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992. The intellectual dishonesty of these liberal elites is appalling, since none of the examples they cited were actual calls for “early presidential elections,” let alone the deposing of a democratically elected president by a military coup. Nixon resigned the presidency on the eve of his impeachment by Congress. Gerald Ford, his vice president was sworn in as president. No early elections. De Gaulle voluntarily resigned the presidency after more than 10 years in power after promising that he would do so if the public did not endorse his reforms of the Senate and local governments. When the public rejected his referendum, he kept his promise although he was not obligated to do so constitutionally. After six years in power, Alfonsín was not even on the ballot for the 1989 presidential elections. However, both parliamentary and presidential elections were held simultaneously in the summer of 1989. The new president was supposed to be inaugurated five months later, but when his party’s candidate was defeated by the opposition, Alfonsín stepped down early to allow the new president from the opposition to assume power. No early elections. After two years in power, De Mello was impeached by the legislature for corruption in a constitutional proceeding and resigned. The fact that no constitutional mechanism in the world allows for a removal by popular protests did not bother these liberal figures who were intent on removing a freely elected president by the military regardless of the dangerous precedent it sets. Noted author Alaa Al-Aswani not only cited some of the above examples as valid precedents to depose and overthrow Morsi, but he did not miss a beat or see the irony when he showered the military with accolades before ending his weekly column with his usual declaration “Democracy is the Solution.” It is a fact that some democracies have a constitutional mechanism to recall a head of state. Although there is no such mechanism for the U.S. president, many state constitutions allow the recall of their governors. In 2003, the people of California recalled Gov. Gray Davis. But that recall was not the result of street protests and the intervention of the National Guard. Rather, it was a constitutional process that involved the signing and authentication of millions of petitions by the State Supreme Court that authorized the recall process. Although the 2012 Egyptian constitution allows for the impeachment of the president by parliament, it did not allow for a recall. Source: globalresearch.ca
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 23:43:41 +0000
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