As they have previously, Democratic leaders staunchly oppose Kucinich's impeachment effort. They expect to table the resolution by referring it to the Judiciary Committee, where they expect it to die.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyers (D-Md.) suggested yesterday that engaging in a lengthy debate over impeaching Bush in the waning days of his administration is not a productive use of the House's time.
I'm shocked. Shocked.
So, is this a colossal waste of time? Or do we need to impeach to ensure there won't be another law-breaking, Constitutional-trashing administration like Bush's?
I used to be against impeachment. I felt that to open up a can of worms like that would really contribute to further polarizing this country, and I felt that would be a bad thing. But a couple things are changing my mind.
First, the recent fundraising and PR surge of Ron Paul. It should not surprise progressives that while we might disagree with Mr. Paul when it comes to most domestic issues, we are pretty much in agreement when it comes to foreign policy and international law because of a little document entitled the Constitution of the United States. We are also against the current Bush administration policy of spying on their own citizens.
The second item that is changing my mind is the overwhelming glut of comments on the Web in support of Dennis Kucinich and his bill to impeach the Vice President. What affect would this have on all those who voted for change? I think that there is a simmering going on in this country as we speak. It is below the radar level of the large news conglomerates and it is fueled by sites like this one at both ends of the political spectrum. The "liberal" media is just as complicit and the true liberal and conservative patriots can see that they have no voice.
So what say you? This should be an open thread. I am especially interested in hearing from our favorite trolls. Would you support Mr. Paul? I want your honest opinions. No football game commentaries please. Is it time for real justice?
On September 11 this year, Democrats from Beaverhead county met and decided to call for the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Members of the Beaverhead Democrats are drafting letters for our Congressional delegation - Rehberg, Baucus, and Tester - to that effect.
The discussion was heated. Many wanted to avoid making the statement, because they felt it would alienate voters in a conservative county where Democrats already have a hard time winning seats. Others felt like it would be a futile gesture. But no one claimed that our country's top officials weren't guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and in the end, the call for impeachment won the day:
Following lengthy discussion, it was agreed in the meeting that emphasis in the letters should be on impeachment as a constitutional remedy to the dangerous excesses of the executive branch rather than a merely personal attack on Bush and Cheney.
"We're interested in preserving the Constitution not scoring political points," said one of the participants.
I got my hands on the draft of the letter Beaverhead Democrats are writing. In it, they present our delegation with a long list of offenses the president and his second-in-command have committed against the rule of law, international agreements, and the American people. Spying on Americans without a warrant. Misleading Congress in congressional investigations. Breaking Congressionally ratified international treaties by invading Iraq, torturing, suspending habeas corpus.
"In the conduct described above," write the authors, "George W. Bush and Richard Cheney have violated their constitutional oaths to faithfully execute their offices, and, to the best of their abilities, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. They have violated their constitutional duty to take care that laws be faithfully executed and have arrogated excessive power to the executive branch in violation of basic constitutional principles of the separation of powers."
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
Basically, the administration is boldly saying he'll never let his "loyal Bushies" investigate his activities.
Legal experts are taken aback. Congress' only action -- which is also its best option -- is to use its inherent contempt powers, which allows it to hire its own special counsel. Mark Keiman details other possible steps, including seizure of documents, and arrest of administration officials by Congress' Seargeants-at-Arms, or cutting off funding for the DoJ and other administration bureaucracies.
So it's almost been 48 hours since I posted a hit piece against Cindy Sheehan about trying to force the Democratic party on impeachment and the ensuing fracas with commenter Kate over the politics of the situation, and I admit I'm coming around on the impeachment issue. Thanks to last night's Bill Moyers segment on impeachment, I'm getting swayed.
To me it's a clash between the practical -- that is, getting 66 Senators to convict Bush of high crimes and misdemeanors -- and the necessary, the preservation of constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law, and to establish the precedent that the executive branch shall not take powers not granted it by the Constitution or the by the people through their elected representatives in Congress.
Okay. The Bill Moyers segment has damn near convinced me we should seriously consider going ahead with impeachment. (I'll write up a post on this as soon as a transcript is available.) I know it's been maybe an hour since I said it was a risky and futile political maneuver. I still believe that. I'm conflicted.
As senior intelligence and law enforcement officials met again today in the White House Situation Room to deal with the "summer terror threat," a top terror commander said an attack was coming that would dwarf the failed bombings in London and Glasgow.
Let's set aside for a moment the hollowness of the threat. Frankly the London and Glasgow plots were ill-conceived and miserably executed. It wouldn't take much to "dwarf" them. Letting off a firecracker in a movie theater, for example.
First, this smacks of more fear-mongering by the administration. Chertoff had a "gut feeling" we're going to be attacked, and now you see the media dutifully stoke up the panic with crap stories like this. (Yeah, a Taliban leader threatened big attacks in the US. And the head coach of the Raiders vowed to take his team to the playoffs.) The administration has a history of tweaking with terror alerts and fantasy plots to influence politics. That's worthy of both impeachment and a swift kick in the *ss.
Second, if this threat is real and imminent, and something actually happens -- it's not the shrapnel I'll be worrying about, it'll be the overreaction of the government. This a group of thugs that kidnaps, tortures, and spies on its own people in times of safety. Think what they'll do when the sh*t flies. Not to mention their track record against your standard-issue emergencies like, say, hurricanes.
I do not want these people in power in a time of emergency.
In a weird post, entitled "I have been warned," at the Daily Kos, Cindy Sheehan announced that she'll no longer be posting there because, in her announced challenge to Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, she's running as an independent. The Daily Kos is a Democratic blog. It's right there in the FAQ:
This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we're all still in this fight together. We happily embrace centrists like NDN's Simon Rosenberg and Howard Dean, conservatives like Martin Frost and Brad Carson, and liberals like John Kerry and Barack Obama. Liberal? Yeah, we're around here and we're proud. But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory....
Thus, Sheehan can't post because Kos does not provide a forum for non-Democrats to unseat Democratic candidates.
Some -- including Sheehan, based on the tone and title of her post -- are considering this censorship, or worse. Allahpundit calls it a "purge." BooMan accuses Kos of booting Sheehan because she "doesn't automatically show fealty to the Democratic party." Etc. & co. The basic gist is that Kos is stifling ideas at his site, putting the Party over principle, and so forth.
The usually thoughtful Montana Liberty Project has brought up the possible impeachment just in the way it shouldn't: framing it as a tit-for-tat political gambit:
To run a redux, especially in sequence would be the peak of folly. There is nothing to gain except a political score. My message to Congress and Democratic supporters: fail to make yourselves objects of Historian's ridicule.
In reality, of course, supporting a Clinton impeachment was political. Opposing a Bush impeachment is political.
I've got to be honest. For a long time, I've been one of those nay-sayers on impeachment -- it's too time-consuming, do we really want Cheney, we don't have the votes to convict, yada yada yada.
But increasingly, I'm very amazed by how outside the realm of possibility the issue is treated.
I mean, let's just ignore illegal wiretapping, secret prisons, Gitmo, torture, stonewalling of Congress, executive 4th branch privilege, and everything else.
In his commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, the White House lied (again -- really, this is about as surprising as a newborn pooping himself). From Patrick Fitzgerald's statement:
- We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.
- We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as "excessive." The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.
In other words, Mr. President is full of crap. But that's not news. What is news is that this President thinks anyone deserves to have a sentence reconsidered.
I don?t believe my role [as governor] is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own, unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.
[W]hether Scooter Libby's original sentence was exactly correct is an interesting question I can't answer; while I have a rough sense it was in the right ballpark, I didn't follow the case closely enough to have any particular views of that.
Nonetheless, I find Bush's action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received. President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead. Come to think of it, I don't know if Bush has ever actually used his powers to get one single person out of jail even one day early. If there are such cases, they are certainly few and far between. So Libby's treatment was very special indeed.
Shocking. Utterly shocking.
As Marcy Wheeler, who has tirelessly followed this entire scandal and is one of the nation's leading experts on Plamegate, notes -- there's a good reason for a commutation, rather than a pardon. Good reason -- at least if you're the President. A pardon would wipe away Scooter's 5th Amendment protections against implicating himself -- which would make him a target for Congressional inquiries into what really happened. With a commutation, but not official declaration of the purging of his record, Scooter still has his 5th Amendment protection. In other words, he can't squeal on the President or the Vice President -- two men clearly knee deep in the decision to out a clandestine CIA officer.
Kagro X, who has advocated vocally for impeachment for a while, found this damning exchange from the Constitutional Conference:
n the [Constitutional] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or, before indictment or conviction, "to stop inquiry and prevent detection." James Madison responded:
"[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds [to] believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty..."
So the question is simply this, Congressional Democrats, pundits, and national media -- the President has made it abundantly clear that he does not care whatsoever for the rule of law. At what point do any of you start expressing concern over maintaining the most basic fabric underlying America's existence as a free republic?
Granted -- more investigations might reveal that the smoke isn't coming from fire. But investigations are clearly warranted.
So. The Senate Republicans blocked a "no confidence" vote in Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. It received only 53 votes, not enough to end a Republican filibuster.
The "no confidence" vote is, of course, a non-binding resolution. Senate Democrats were hoping that such a passed vote would pressure to the Attorney General to finally resign, instead of launching a risky and time-consuming impeachment process.
Republicans, however, spun spun spun their vote of "confidence" in Gonzalez, crying "politics" while obviously supporting "their" man in the name of politics. (Their support certainly can't be based on competency. Or honesty. Or integrity.)
I've read a lot about the crazy left a lot. I know it exists out there. The way some folks write about it indicates that I'm a member of it, though, and that's something I can't really understand.
Anyways, check out this poll at Daily Kos and this one at MyDD. In the two most powerful bastions of the liberal netroots, the community is strongly rejecting impeachment as a goal.
Now, that's setting the bar pretty low -- which is to say not so low that the Republican Congress could get itself over the bar in the '90s.
In other words, the great unwashed in the comments in Daily Kos have greater restraint than virtually every Republican in Congress.
