[Sosfbay-discuss] Huge Win for Impeachment in Vermont: Impeachment Movement picking up steam

Sat Apr 21 07:04:57 PDT 2007

http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2007/042007Lindorff.shtml

Huge Win for Impeachment in Vermont
by Dave Lindorff

Slowly, steadily, the public, grassroots movement to impeach this
criminal president and vice president, and to restore the rule of law,
and the Constitution, is building.

The impeachment movement, which has been building steam since the
November election, got a big boost this morning when the Vermont Senate
overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the US Congress to
initiate impeachment proceedings against President George Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney.

The 16-9 vote, which saw the Senate’s six Republicans joined by only
three Democrats, will make it difficult for Vermont House Speaker Gaye
Symington, a Democrat who has opposed the impeachment resolution drive,
to keep the measure from being voted on the House floor. Symington has
been arguing against such a resolution, claiming it would be
“divisive.”

The vote in the state senate was a huge victory for grassroots
Democratic activists, who had been forced over recent months to
overcome opposition to impeachment from the national Democratic Party
leadership, and from their own state’s Democratic Congressional
Delegation. Leading Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA), have been arguing that impeachment could hurt Democratic
prospects among independent voters in the November 2008 elections. But
impeachment activists have countered that the president and vice
president have violated the law and undermined the Constitution, and
that it is inappropriate to let strategic and tactical interests of the
Democratic Party enter into the decision on whether to impeach.

To get around opposition from leading Democrats, Vermont’s impeachment
activists organized a statewide grassroots campaign to have as many
towns as possible endorse impeachment in resolutions introduced at the
annual town meetings that are the primary form of governance in most of
the state’s municipalities. In the end, 39 towns voted for impeachment
resolutions in their annual meetings in February. This sent a strong
message to state legislators about the mood of the voters in the state.
In the end, that message trumped pressure from Washington.

"This gives an immeasurable boost to the national push for impeachment,
and the timing could not be better, “ said David Swanson, a leader of
the national impeachment movement who runs a website at
www.afterdowingstreet.com. Swanson noted that Rep. Dennis Kucinich
(D-OH), a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination,
is preparing to introduce a bill of impeachment against the Vice
President Cheney next Wednesday. And adds that impeachment groups are
planning coordinated events all over the country on April 28th
(www.a28.org) He said, “What just happened in Vermont went down exactly
the way things should in a democracy. Citizens raised their voices,
passed local resolutions, and demanded that their state senators act.
The hard work of Dan DeWalt, Ellen Tenney, and so many other Vermonters
is beginning to pay off. Vermont may be remembered as the state that
saved the Republic."

The mass movement for impeachment in Vermont has also had its impact on
the local media there, which in turn may have pushed the state’s
senators to act. On April 13, a week before the senate vote, the
state's third-ranked newspaper, the Brattleboro Reformer, ran an
editorial headlined “Impeach Bush or Get Out of the Way.”

The paper wrote:

    There will be a time when future generations will look at us and
wonder why President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not removed
from office.

    They will look at us and question why, when confronted by the most
corrupt and incompetent administration ever witnessed in the United
States, nothing was done to stop Bush and Cheney.

    They will look at the craven behavior of the Democrats, too afraid
to take on the president when it mattered. They will look at the
Republicans, so intoxicated with power that they backed their president
to the hilt, even as he ran this country off a cliff. They will look at
the press, and how too many journalists were cowed into parroting the
words of the administration. They will look at the voters, and shake
their heads in disbelief that a number of Americans voted for all this
-- the electoral equivalent of the chickens voting Colonel Sanders
president.

    And they will look at Vermont, and how a bottom-up impeachment
effort with broad support ran into a brick wall of indifference in
Montpelier as well as Washington.

The editorial pointedly attacked House leader Symington and Senate
President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, saying:

    History will not look kindly on House Speaker Gaye Symington for
her insistence that her chamber must focus on "important matters" and
that the House "does not have the time" to deal with impeachment.

    History will not look kindly on Senate President Pro Tem Peter
Shumlin, who has talked loudly about impeaching Bush and Cheney, but
won't pursue the issue as long Symington says no.

The grassroots and media pressure clearly worked on Shumlin, who had
long insisted he supported impeachment, but that there “wasn’t time”
for an impeachment resolution. Shumlin allowed the vote today, and it
sailed through, belying concerns about time. Now the pressure shifts to
Symington.

The Vermont Senate vote carries enormous significance. If it is
followed by a similar vote in the Vermont House, where a similar
resolution has 20 sponsors, Vermont will be the first state in the
nation to have a joint resolution calling for Congress to begin
impeachment of the president.

One newspaper, the Vermont Guardian, reports that House impeachment
backers plan to spend the next few days collecting signatures from
fellow representatives to introduce an identical resolution next
Wednesday in their chamber. Says State Rep. Dave Zuckerman, “We will
take the same language the Senate passed today and turn it in Tuesday
afternoon, which gives people around the state time to call their
representatives and ask them to sign it; we would then have it on the
calendar for Wednesday and the speaker will either let it be voted on
or have it sent to committee.” He added, “Many of us are quite pleased
they took the vote, but it’s clear that it only happened because
citizens got involved.”

Under Thomas Jefferson’s Manual for Rules of the House, such a joint
resolution, should it pass, is an alternative route to impeachment, and
would require the House Judiciary Committee to initiate an impeachment
hearing to determine whether grounds for impeachment of the president
and vice president exist. It would no longer be possible, in other
words, for Speaker Pelosi to continue blocking impeachment and
intimidating representatives from filing impeachment bills.

It would also be a strong signal that the American public wants
impeachment.

Finally, it would be impossible for the corporate media to continue to
maintain, as it has done for over a year now, that impeachment is
simply the desire of a group of fringe left-wing Democrats.

Bush and Cheney are still a long way from being in the dock in
Congress, but today’s vote in the Vermont Senate has to have sent a
cold chill up the spine of both men, who now have to start
contemplating about the fate of Richard Nixon.

Certainly when the late Father Robert Drinan (D-MA) filed his initial
impeachment bill against Richard Nixon, who had won re-election by a
landslide, no one expected to see the president actually facing
impeachment hearings and removal from office. But hearings, and more
bills of impeachment, followed, Nixon’s crimes were laid bare on prime
time TV, and in the end three articles of impeachment were voted out of
the House Judiciary Committee, one of them unanimously. Nixon resigned
from office in disgrace when it became clear he would be impeached in
the House and removed by the Senate if he tried to stay on.

Slowly, steadily, the public, grassroots movement to impeach this
criminal president and vice president, and to restore the rule of law,
and the Constitution, is building.

Soon it will be the leaders of Congress, not of the Vermont
legislature, who will be facing the wrath of angry voters demanding
that they stop dithering and start honoring their oaths of office to
uphold and defend the Constitution. As the Brattleboro Reformer put it,
Congress is “shirking its responsibility” because when it comes to
impeaching Bush and Cheney, “nothing is more important.”
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Another book is of CounterPunch
columns, titled This Can't Be Happening!, is published by Common
Courage Press. Lindorff's latest book is The Case for Impeachment: The
Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office,
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky. Visit his website for more
information. Lindorff may be reached at dlindorff at yahoo.com. This story
is published in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is
expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

This story was published on April 20, 2007.

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