Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) writes on impeachment:
Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) writes on impeachment:
“If we fail to take action to either impeach or repair the damage, then the next president will ‘inherit’ unchecked powers. Unchecked powers are unacceptable no matter who is president.”
UPDATE: “Nine out of 23 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee favor starting impeachment hearings against Vice-President Dick Cheney. Six of the nine are co-sponsors of H.R. 799, which contains three articles of impeachment,” according to CounterPunch.
Wexler: Cheney impeachment ‘far stronger than Watergate.’
Wexler: Cheney impeachment ‘far stronger than Watergate.’
Last night, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) took to the House floor to urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings into Vice President Cheney for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Wexler, who has already acquired nearly 190,000 supporters through his website, explained his next steps:
Tomorrow, I will deliver these names to my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee with a letter to my friend, Chairman Conyers, calling for hearings. I will ask my colleagues to sign this letter … Continuing every day for months, I will publish in the Congressional Record several thousand names of supporters who signed up.
History demands that we take action, because the case against Vice President Cheney is far stronger than the illegality surrounding Watergate.
Watch Wexler’s speech:
“In the history of our nation, we have never encountered a moment where the actions of a President or a Vice President have more strongly demanded the use of the power of impeachment,” Wexler said last night.
George McGovern calls for impeachment.
In today’s Washington Post, former presidential candidate George McGovern calls for Bush and Cheney’s impeachment:
After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.
Today I have made a different choice. […]
I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?
Wexler On Impeachment: ‘This Is Not The Lunatic Fringe — This Is Mainstream America’
Wexler On Impeachment: ‘This Is Not The Lunatic Fringe — This Is Mainstream America’
Today on the Ed Schultz Show, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) discussed his effort to increase public pressure for the commencement of impeachment hearings against Vice President Dick Cheney. Wexler has launched a website — WexlerWantsHearings.com — to collect signatures in support of his call.
Wexler explained that he launched his website after traditional media outlets rejected an op-ed he had written with his colleagues Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI):
We laid out precisely why the House Judiciary Committee should open up hearings. … And we set out in an op-ed why we should do it, and none of the major newspapers in the country — the New York Times or the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the LA Times — they chose not to run it.
I thought it was a fairly significant statement by the mainstream media that when members of the House Judiciary Committee lay out a credible claim for why impeachment hearings should begin regarding the Vice President of the United States, and they refuse to run it, then we decided well we would start this website…and see what the feeling was in terms of mainstream America.
Listen to it:
Wexler said he has been “astonished” by the outpouring of support — over 100,000 have signed up in five days. He said he plans to write a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) in early January, asking him to begin start impeachment hearings.
“This is not the lunatic fringe — this is mainstream America,” Wexler said. These are “people that believe in the very patriotic vision, and they’re all very upset about what they see as the abuse of power by this administration and the failure of Congress to hold them accountable.”
Majority believe Bush has committed impeachable offenses.
Majority believe Bush has committed impeachable offenses.
A new American Research Group poll finds that 55 percent of voters believe President Bush has “abused his powers” in a manner that rises “to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution,” yet just 34 percent believe he should actually be impeached. Fifty-two percent say that Vice President Cheney has similarly abused his powers, with 43 percent supporting impeachment.
Cheney impeachment measure advances.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney advanced in the House today due largely to the backing of House Republicans. Kucinich’s measure “failed to win the backing of the House leadership,” and when a vote came to table the impeachment resolution, conservatives voted against it before they voted for it:
Midway through the vote, with instructions from the GOP leadership, Republicans one by one changed their votes from yes — to kill the resolution — to no, trying to force the chamber into a debate and an up-or-down vote on the proposal.
At one point there were 290 votes to table. After the turnaround, the final vote was 251-162 against tabling, with 165 Republicans voting against it.
“We’re going to help them out, to explain themselves,” said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. “We’re going to give them their day in court.”
UPDATE: The House just voted 218-194 to send Kucinich’s impeachment resolution to the Judiciary Committee, thus killing the bill and preventing a debate on impeachment.
UPDATE II: CapNewsNet has video of the activity on the House floor today.
Fein argues for Bush and Cheney impeachment.
Former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein recently sat down with the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle to discuss how “George W. Bush’s foreign policies are making Americans less safe, and why the president and Vice President Dick Cheney should be impeached.” You can listen to the audio here.
Former Senate Intel Chairman Graham: The Case For Impeachment ‘Is Even More Truthful Today’
Former Senate Intel Chairman Graham: The Case For Impeachment ‘Is Even More Truthful Today’
Former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-FL) was one of 23 Senators to have voted against the Iraq war resolution in October 2002. “With sadness,” he told his colleagues, “I predict we will live to regret this day, Oct. 10, 2002, the day we stood by and we allowed these terrorist organizations to continue growing in the shadows.”
Just four months after Bush launched the Iraq war, Graham floated the idea of impeachment. “Clearly, if the standard is now what the House of Representatives did in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the actions of this president [are] much more serious in terms of dereliction of duty,” he said. In an interview this week with ThinkProgress, Graham said he stood by his 2003 statement:
How many Americans would say that it is a greater dereliction of duty as President of the United States to have a consensual sexual affair or to take the country to war under manipulated, fabricated, and largely untruthful representations which the President knew or should have known. I think the answer to that question is clear.
Graham added that it’s unlikely Bush would be impeached, explaining that he learned the word impeachment is an “incendiary word” that Americans shy away from. “Americans don’t like impeachment because it connotes the kind of instability that so many other countries around the world have known.” But he added that his original remark regarding impeachment “was a truthful statement at the time and it’s even more truthful today.”
CLICK HERE TO LISTENRight before the Senate vote on the Iraq resolution, the mild-mannered Graham sounded the alarms in unusually stark language. “If you believe that the American people are not going to be at additional threat,” he said, “then, frankly, my friends — to use a blunt term — blood is going to be on your hands.”
Asked to reflect on that statement today, Graham said, “There are 3,500 fewer American servicemen alive today in the world since the day I made that statement. There are tens of thousands of civilians who’ve lost their lives. The United States is at dramatically greater risk of terrorism… So I’m afraid that the blood has flown fuller, deeper, and redder that I thought it was going to.”
Graham also ridiculed Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s (I-CT) calls for taking “aggressive military action” against Iran:
I don’t know where we’re going to get the troops to take aggressive offensive action against Iran. Iran’s a country that’s approximately 2.5 times the population of Iraq. It has a GDP that’s twice that of Iraq. It is a much more significant force in the world. And we see how bogged down we are in Iraq, how in the world are we going to even consider using massive military force against Iran?
Hagel Suggests Possibility Of Bush Impeachment: ‘He’s Not Accountable Anymore’
Hagel Suggests Possibility Of Bush Impeachment: ‘He’s Not Accountable Anymore’
According to a new report in Esquire magazine, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has suggested that Congress may consider the impeachment of President Bush before his term ends:
“The president says, ‘I don’t care.’ He’s not accountable anymore,” Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. “He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don’t know. It depends how this goes.”
The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word — impeachment — spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe Senate seat in a reddish state. It’s barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country, and now there was a war going bad because of it.
Hagel isn’t the only one frustrated. The desire for more accountability over Bush has led to increasing calls for impeachment from the Washington State legislature, the mayor of Salt Lake City, and town hall meetings in Vermont.
Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) said pushing for impeachment would be counterproductive because it would break off efforts to recruit conservative support for changing the course of the war in Iraq. “We’re trying to get [conservatives] to vote against the war. They’re coming around. You don’t hear them singing the virtues of George Bush like they used to. But nothing will turn this into a partisan lockdown faster than impeachment.” Inslee added, “Ending the war is what’s important now.”
Conservative Scholars Argue Bush’s Wiretapping Is An Impeachable Offense
Conservative Scholars Argue Bush’s Wiretapping Is An Impeachable Offense
Conservative scholars Bruce Fein and Norm Ornstein argued yesterday on The Diane Rehm show that, should Bush remain defiant in defending his constitutionally-abusive wire-tapping of Americans (as he has indicated he will), Congress should consider impeaching him.
QUESTION: Is spying on the American people as impeachable an offense as lying about having sex with an intern?
BRUCE FEIN, constitutional scholar and former deputy attorney general in the Reagan Administration: I think the answer requires at least in part considering what the occupant of the presidency says in the aftermath of wrongdoing or rectification. On its face, if President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a war-time President I can do anything I want — I don’t need to consult any other branches — that is an impeachable offense. It’s more dangerous than Clinton’s lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages. It would set a precedent that would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant.
NORM ORNSTEIN, AEI scholar: I think if we’re going to be intellectually honest here, this really is the kind of thing that Alexander Hamilton was referring to when impeachment was discussed.
(Listen to The Diane Rehm show here. The segment above begins at 33:40)
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