(Sorry, short unfinished-ish message here. We’re about to head out of town for a week in San Diego, and I wanted to get it posted.)
Why exactly is Nancy Pelosi opposed to initiating impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney?
Last November she declared such action “off the table,” and he has held fiercely to that line despite the administration’s
continuing incompetence, lawlessness, and sub-Harding popularity.
There is little question that Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and possibly others in the current administration have committed the sort of “high crimes and misdeamnors” that the antimonarchist Framers envisioned when they created the Constitutional remedy of impeachment.
The evidence of what they did and why they did it seems easily at hand, given that many of the details have appeared in the floodwater of coverage from the reinvigorated Post and Times and in several volumes of best-selling nonfiction over the past 18 months.
A telephone poll conducted last month by the American Research Group suggested that the public is not only open to but eager for such a remedy. Of voters surveyed, 46% supported impeachment proceedings against Bush and a true majority (54%) wanted to see action against Cheney.
And yet Pelosi — the Democratic leader of Congress, a fervent partisan (in the absolutely worst sense), and the biggest beneficiary of the last election cycle’s fervor to throw the bums out — refuses to do just that. The bums must stay.
In her latest statement (see http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/?pid=218930), she suggests that impeachment proceedings would divide the country, engender negative feelings toward the Democrats in Congress, and distract the legislature from the rest of their agenda.
This is all true, more or less, and yet it is hard to imagine a clearer case for action that a president and vice president who abuse their power of appointment, manipulate intelligence resources to further their own agenda, invent baseless legal grounds to justify instruct aides to ignore congressional authority, and on and on.
Presumably the Democratic Speaker of the House would want to exercise the Congress’s power to throw a corrupt Republican administration out of the White House. What gives? Sure, removing Bush and Cheney would put Pelosi herself in the White House, an end game that would tend to cast any championship of the impeachment cause on her part in a harsh light.
Still, the possible appearance of self-interest is not a reasonable defense for the shirking of duties. Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales swore to uphold the law, then violated it repeatedly. That’s a cut-and-dried case for impeachment, is it not?
What am I missing?
(Great podcast on the subject, by the way, over at Bill Moyers’ Journal:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07132007/profile.html)
August 6, 2007 at 9:14 pm |
After the ‘06 elections, I was under no illusions about the power of Democrats in the Senate and House to squeeze much good policy out of their paper-thin margins. That’s not the way the system works, even without the veto pen in the hands of someone who would rather harm the country than help the Democrats advance good legislation. So long as they have the Executive and Judicial branches arrayed against them, they’re like Spiderman trying to stop that elevated train in Spiderman 2. Nobody complained that Spiderman wasn’t driving them someplace nice, they just thanked him for stopping the catastrophe.
As to impeachment; I don’t know. While there’s no question that Bush and Cheney have weakened the country, lied, spied, tortured, killed, and cynically deepened the divide between rich are poor, I don’t know that they’ve done so in a way that’s so demonstrably outside their ambit as to be a “high crime and misdemeanor.” Even if they did, I don’t know that the Democrats can muster enough votes to win a conviction.
I understand the argument that we owe it to the founding fathers, as well as our own children, to impeach these men for the harm they’ve done. It’s persuasive to me because it seems like justice. But it’s hard for me to look at the evidence dispassionately anymore: if Democrats don’t have the case or the votes to convict, then what’s the lesson of a failed impeachment trial?
The Democrats are notoriously timid. This thing where they just caved in to allow Alberto Gonzalez (you. must. be. kidding. me.) to oversee widespread secret surveillance is beyond the pale. But I think they’d go for impeachment if they thought their case was sound enough, and until it is they’ll just keep stacking documents like cordwood.
There’s plenty of time, yet…