Particles Of Impeachment

by poputonian

In my earlier post, I referenced an article that appeared in the mainstream populist publication In These Times. It was authored by John Nichols and carries the title "In Praise of Impeachment." The article compels me to change my original passive position of letting the Congressional investigations run their course, and to instead insist on impeachment. It's a duty to do so. Nichols begins, appropriately, with Richard Nixon and Watergate:

Grassroots Democrats and a few bold members of Congress began suggesting that issues raised by the Watergate burglaries and related matters were serious enough to merit discussion of impeachment. House Speaker Carl Albert, House Minority Leader Tip O'Neill and most of their compatriots in the Democratic Party knew at the time that, despite the president's protestations, Nixon was indeed a crook -- and by extension, that he and his nefarious inner circle had committed acts that gave definition to the deliberately amorphous term "high crimes and misdemeanors." Yet, they took impeachment off the table -- and kept it off -- until the evolution of the scandal and the popular outcry it inspired forced them to put the most powerful tool in the arsenal of the republic back where it belonged.

The article goes on to describe Pelosi as a bit player (at present), and that her pronouncement that "impeachment is off the table" should not be taken seriously.

Why should we dismiss the Speaker-to-be's adamant dismissal of impeachment as mere wordplay? Not because Pelosi is secretly plotting impeachment. Rather, because any meaningful movement to impeach a president -- and, in the case of the Bush-Cheney administration, a vice president -- does not come from the Speaker of the House. The Speaker is, in fact, often the last to know when the constitutional moment has arrived.

Impeachment is an organic process, imagined as such by the founders. Its seed is not naturally planted in Washington, nor nurtured there. When an impeachment initiative is little more than a manifestation of inside-the-Beltway partisanship, as was the case with the Clinton impeachment of the late 90s, its proponents invite an appropriate rebuke from the citizenry. But when proposals for impeachment are grounded in popular concern for the republic in general, and the application of the rule of law in particular -- as are moves to sanction Bush and Cheney for illegal war-making and wiretapping -- the process will begin at the grassroots and grow until it cannot be denied in Washington.
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So the question is not: Where does Pelosi stand at the opening of this session of Congress? Rather, it is: Where do the American people stand?

Polling tells us that Americans are a good deal more enthusiastic about holding this president to account than are the leaders of what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as an opposition party. A majority of Americans surveyed last fall in a national poll by the respected firm Ipsos Public Affairs, which measures public opinion on behalf of the Associated Press, agreed with the statement: "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

It was not entirely surprising that 72 percent of the Democrats were inclined toward impeachment. What was more interesting was that 56 percent of Independents were ready to hold the president to account, as were 20 percent of Republicans.

(Think what those poll numbers must be today after the Junior's own surrogate-uncle Baker led the parade that trashed the boy-President's self-ingratiating foreign adventure.)

But polls are easily dismissed, even by the politicians who live by them. Harder to neglect are the signals from around the country, where citizens have been asked to vote on the question of whether impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney is needed. Pelosi might want to take note of the message her own constituents sent on the same day that the Democrats' victory reversed a dozen years of Republican control of the House.

San Franciscans were asked on Nov. 7 to vote "yes" or "no" on Proposition J, a measure calling on the city's elected representatives to "use every available legal mechanism to effect the impeachment and removal from office of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for committing high crimes and misdemeanors in violation of the United States Constitution." The measure won with more than 58 percent of the vote. Pelosi's hometown wasn't the only city to vote for impeachment on November 7. Calls for impeachment won voter approval from Cunningham Township, Illinois to Berkeley, California, adding the names of those communities to the list of two-dozen municipalities nationwide that have now officially adopted impeachment resolutions.

Another measure of popular sentiment regarding impeachment -- -one that Pelosi should understand -- came in the congressional elections of Nov. 7. More than three-dozen Democratic members of the House faced voters as explicit advocates for keeping the impeachment option on the table. Thirty-eight members of the House signed on over the past year to H. Res. 635, a measure sponsored by Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. It proposed to investigate whether members of the Bush administration made moves to invade Iraq before receiving congressional authorization, manipulating pre-war intelligence, encouraged the use of torture in Iraq and elsewhere, and used their positions to retaliate against critics of the war.

H. Res. 635 explicitly states that the select committee would be charged with making recommendations regarding grounds for the possible impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

So how did supporters of the "dangerous" principle that impeachment should be kept "on the table" fare at the polls?

One co-ponsor of the resolution, Rep. Bernie Sanders, (I-VT), was elected to the Senate. Every other member of the House who signed on for an impeachment inquiry and faced voters on Nov. 7 was reelected, in many cases with an increased percentage of the vote.

Here's the stake we need to drive through this administration's immoral, paranoid heart:

It should come as no surprise that, when offered the option of impeaching, voters will opt for it. Outside of Washington, there are still a lot of Americans who recognize impeachment not as the "Constitutional crisis" that so much of the political class and the media fear, but as the cure for the crisis. This was as the founders intended when they inserted all those references to impeachment [it appears six times] into a Constitution that does not mention God, corporations, or the two-party system. They wanted Americans to know that they had a tool for challenging the tyranny of an "elected despot." [Nichols use of the term "elected despot" was quoting a Jefferson letter to Madison.]

So, it falls to the people to restore a proper understanding of the necessity of impeachment: by voting for local resolutions, passing petitions, and protesting. That process will be helped along by the investigation of Bush administration misdeeds that will, as did the initial investigations of Watergate-related wrongs, provide a steady reconfirmation of the crisis.

Before the House Judiciary Committee weighed the articles of impeachment against Nixon, a congressional break sent federal legislators back to their home districts. Many, including Tip O'Neill, went with some trepidation. They feared that the people would tell them that Congress had gone too far in questioning the authority and actions of the president. Instead, as O'Neill told a reporter for Time magazine, they found the people were asking: "What are you waiting for?" As Time noted in that Watergate summer of 1974, members of the House learned from their constituents that "impeachment is good politics." Indeed, it became increasingly clear to Democrats, as well as smart Republicans, that it was riskier to refuse to impeach than it was to embrace the Constitutional imperative.

So what are we waiting for? George W. Bush had better strap on his Codpiece, and Dick Cheney had better grab his cholestrol-infested ass. I think the rank and file are coming after them.

NOTE: John Nichols is the author a book called The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism (The New Press).