[Sosfbay-discuss] New Mexico impeachment initiative

[Jim Doyle]

Two members of the New Mexico state legislature have
introduced legislation seeking an impeachment request
be sent to congress.

The full article is in the nation magazine and can be found at
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0126-25.htm

Here are some excerpts:

Prior to CNN personality Wolf Blitzer's testy-if-not-particularly 
substantive interview with the vice president on Wednesday, the 
network's resident rabble rouser, commentator Jack Cafferty, presented a 
reasonably favorable feature on a move by New Mexico state Senators 
Jerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, and John Grubesic, D-Santa Fe, to get 
that state's legislature to petition Congress to impeach both Cheney and 
Bush.

The New Mexico impeachment initiative, one of several currently moving 
forward in state legislatures around the country, is designed to force 
members of Congress to take seriously the increasingly-popular demand 
that the president and vice president be held to account for misleading 
Congress over the Iraq war, supporting torture, engaging in illegal 
spying on U.S. citizens and using their offices to punish critics.
...
The New Mexico legislators have taken their cue from Thomas Jefferson, 
who in a manual of congressional procedures written more than two 
centuries ago affirmed that state legislatures could petition the House 
to impeach federal officials.

The third president explained in Section 603 of his Manual on 
Parliamentary Practice and Rules of the House of Representatives, a 
volume that is still referred to by House leaders for precedents and 
guidance, that: "there are various methods of setting an impeachment in 
motion":
1) By charges made on the floor by a member of the House;
2) By charges preferred by a memorial filed by a House member;
3) By charges contained in a Resolution introduced by a House member;
4) By a message from the President; /
5) By charges transmitted by a State legislature/, or a grand jury;
6) By facts developed and reported by an investigating committee of the 
House."
...
 Well the way it works is that a state of course, cannot mandate 
impeachment of a president but the impeachment charges can be forwarded 
to the House of Representatives.

 The newspaper in Santa Fe, 'The New Mexican' reports the measure 
already is running into trouble even though Democrats control both 
chambers of the state legislature, and that's because no Republicans 
support it.

Senate leaders have assigned it to three different committee hearings, 
meaning that there are more chances to kill the measure before it ever 
makes it to a vote.

But the fact that the issue of impeaching a sitting president is being 
discussed seriously in a state legislature like New Mexico's speaks 
volumes."