[Sosfbay-discuss] Impeachment's Back in the News, over 50% of Americans want it!

Mon Apr 9 17:12:26 PDT 2007

Impeachment's Back in the News 

By Dave Lindorff
This Can't Be Happening!, April 6, 2007
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/

You’d have to call it progress when impeachment,
which for almost a year has been a banned word in
the corporate media and the halls of Congress,
starts being discussed as a serious matter, even
if it is only to say that it shouldn’t be done. 

In an April 5 article, the Washington Times
interviewed several members of Congress, noting
along the way that Congressional Democrats report
that “constituents are clamoring” for impeachment
of the president. 

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) is quoted as saying he
gets “one call after another” calling on him to
impeach the president, but he goes on to say
impeachment would be “a very divisive thing
and
at this point I don’t see that happening.” 

Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), one of the House’s most
liberal members, reportedly calls impeachment
pointless and a distraction from the presidential
election. 

Diane Watson (D-CA), another of the most liberal
members of Congress, says she gets calls for
impeachment from every crowd she speaks to, and
says that while she would support impeachment
herself, it’s “not a strategy our new leadership
would want to start with.” 

That comment, of course, really gets to the heart
of it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), has for
almost a year been hammering home her opposition
to impeachment, saying repeatedly that it is “off
the table” and (as she said again last week on
NBC’s “Meet the Press”) that “Democrats are not
about impeachment.” 

Pelosi has enforced her will on this issue by not
so subtly threatening pro-impeachment members of
the Democratic caucus with loss of desired
committee assignments or even committee chair
postings--likely the reason that a leading
impeachment advocate in 2004-6, Rep. John Conyers
(D-MI), has for months retreated into an
embarrassed silence on the issue. 

Lately, however, there are signs that even
Conyers, whose obeisance got him the chairmanship
of the House Judiciary Committee that should have
been his by virtue of seniority alone, is chafing
a bit at Pelosi’s strictures. 

Anthony St. Martin, founder of the website
PledgetoImpeach.org, reports being told by Rep.
Danny Davis (D-IL), and by staff members in the
offices of both Rep. Watson and Rep. Conyers,
that all three of those members of the House
would be willing to push for impeachment if they
received a petition from voters in their
districts representing one percent of the
district population (about 6500 signatures). 

If true, this may then be the strategy for moving
things forward. If last fall’s Newsweek poll is
correct that over 50 percent of the American
public wants the president impeached--and that
would be consistent with earlier polls taken
before the election that showed similar support
for impeachment--it should not be hard to come up
with those kinds of numbers on impeachment
petitions, especially in districts that elected
people like Davis, Watson and Conyers. 

At the same time, efforts are underway now in at
least eight states to push through impeachment
resolutions in both houses of state legislatures.
One attempt failed in New Mexico because of
improper arm-twisting by top national Democrats,
and a second was sidetracked in Washington state
in the same way, but legislative campaigns
continue to move ahead in Vermont, Texas,
Wisconsin, Maryland and elsewhere. Should one of
these states manage to pass a bi-cameral
legislative petition calling on the House to
initiate impeachment, under Thomas Jefferson’s
“Manuel” for rules of the House, the House of
Representatives in Washington would be obligated
to hold a hearing on impeachment. 

Pelosi and other Democratic congressional leaders
can be expected to plead that it’s “too late” in
the president’s second term to begin impeachment
hearings, but this is an absurd argument.
Impeachment of the president on some
grounds--most notably his willful violation of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
and his abuse of signing statements to invalidate
laws passed by the Congress--is so
straightforward and the offenses are so
self-evident that hearings would hardly be
needed. The Judiciary Committee could draw up and
vote out bills of impeachment in a flash. 

Besides, the counter-argument to the lateness
dodge is that it would be important to impeach
this president even if it were done after the
November ’08 election, because not to impeach
Bush for his many crimes and abuses of power
would be to give them the stamp of Congressional
approval, making them the standard of acceptable
behavior for all future presidents. 

Pelosi never gets asked that question by
reporters when she talks about impeachment being
“off the table.” 

As for divisive--what does one call appointing an
ambassador via a “recess appointment” who has
been summarily rejected by the Senate? What does
one call sending 25,000 more troops into the Iraq
War killing fields after an election that showed
the American people to want a quick end to that
war? Clearly the Bush administration is divisive.
Divisiveness already is the prevailing condition
of government in Washington. 

Impeachment would, in any even, not be divisive;
it would be a national cathartic that would bring
a majority of Americans back together around the
support of our founding charter. 

There are signs that at least some Democratic
members of Congress, after years of acting like
lower life forms, are beginning to evolve spines
and a belated recognition that there is a need to
respond to the views of the public, not just the
party elite. If they do begin impeachment
proceedings, they may even find some support
among Republican members of Congress, who also
are looking at facing the voters in 2008 with
growing anxiety. Impeachment is coming back. 

8:22 am pdt