posted on July 13, 2007 08:54:35 PM new
| posted April 20, 2007 (May 7, 2007 issue)
Impeachment Fever Rises
John Nichols
When Nancy Pelosi announced last fall that impeachment was "off the table," official Washington accepted that the primary avenue for holding lawless Presidents to account had been closed off by the new Speaker of the House. But the Republic's citizenry has not been so inclined. And now, with the Administration's troubles mounting, they're preparing to tell Pelosi that America and the world cannot wait until January 20, 2009, to put an end to Bush's reign of error. When Pelosi arrives at the California Democratic Convention in San Diego on April 28--the same day that activists nationwide will rally for presidential accountability--she'll find on the agenda a resolution that declares that the actions of President Bush and Vice President Cheney "warrant impeachment and trial, and removal from office." Delegates are expected to endorse the measure.
Pelosi fears that impeachment would distract from the Democratic legislative agenda and provoke an electoral backlash. History suggests she is wrong: The Watergate Congress was highly efficient, and Democrats had one of their best years ever at the polls after pressuring Richard Nixon out of office. But aside from Dennis Kucinich, who is particularly fired up about Cheney's misdeeds, few in Congress have even hinted at bucking Pelosi's ban.
Outside Washington, however, an "impeachment from below" movement is gathering steam. The President's troop surge into Iraq and his refusal to consider exit strategies has caused many to react like GOP Senator Chuck Hagel, who has observed, "The President says...he's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him." Hagel's remarks go to the heart of the surge in interest in impeachment: It stems from Bush's ongoing disregard for the demands of the electorate, the Congress and the Constitution. Legitimate impeachment initiatives are organic responses to the realities of a moment rather than purely legal procedures. Talk of impeachment gains traction when it becomes clear that an Administration is unwilling to respect the system of checks and balances or the rule of law. This explains why the allegation that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, apparently with White House approval, pressured US Attorneys to politicize prosecutions has added so much fuel to the fire, with activists like Vermont's Dan DeWalt now saying, "I don't have any trouble getting people to agree that impeachment is necessary."
DeWalt engineered a campaign in March to get town meetings in his state to pass resolutions calling on Congress to impeach and remove Bush and Cheney. Three dozen towns did so, including Middlebury, where GOP Governor Jim Douglas found himself presiding over a meeting that voted overwhelmingly in favor of going after the two for misleading the nation about the threat posed by Iraq, condoning torture and approving illegal electronic surveillance. The goal of the town meeting movement was to get the state legislature to forward articles of impeachment to the US House. Citing Thomas Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which makes reference to the authority of state legislatures to propose impeachment, legislators in at least ten states, including Vermont, have now done so. But the real success of the initiative was to illustrate the popular appeal of impeachment--an effort helped along by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who devoted a week of strips to the town meeting votes--and to tell members of Congress like Vermont's Peter Welch that they might want to take their cues from constituents rather than Pelosi. Welch has responded by meeting with activists and asking them for more details of Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors.
DC Democrats still put forth anti-impeachment arguments--particularly the old saw that going after Bush would just give the presidency to Cheney. Activists have countered with an "Impeach Cheney First!" campaign and a reminder that the Constitution in no way prohibits holding more than one official to account at the same time. They've also picked up an argument made by Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, who says it was the threat of impeachment that got Richard Nixon to bend to pressure from Congress to wind down the Vietnam War. "If you want to move Bush on Iraq," says Ellsberg, "get serious about impeachment." Millions of Americans are doing just that. John Nichols
about
John Nichols
John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.
posted on July 14, 2007 02:19:20 AM new
As most SANE people know, these wackos calling for impeachment actually have to have something to impeach him for.
The fact is they have NOTHING. NOTHING.
And the dems wonder why their poll numbers/approval numbers are so VERY, very low with the voters. LOL LOL LOL
"But aside from Dennis Kucinich, who is particularly fired up about Cheney's misdeeds, few in Congress have even hinted at bucking Pelosi's ban."
read THAT and weep.
They have NOTHING and they know it. Just MORE political grandstanding. lol lol
Proving how out of touch with any reality they really are. Their "FEVER" is rising alright - they're SICK, angry, impotent, frustrated whiners who don't even have the support of the progressive socialists in their own party.
They can pretend all they need to....dream away and someday come back to reality.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
posted on July 14, 2007 05:00:07 AM new
Published on Thursday, July 5, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The Libby Commutation: Coincidence, or Conspiracy?
by Thom Hartmann
The President of the United States has the unrestrained Power of granting Pardons for Treason; which may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the Crime, & thereby prevent a Discovery of his own Guilt. – George Mason (1725-1792), the “father of the Bill of Rights,” noting his objection to presidential pardon powers in his first draft commentary on the Constitution of the United States he helped write
Ambassador Joe Wilson writes a New York Times op-ed article suggesting that George W. Bush knowingly lied to the American people in a Constitutionally-required duty of Bush’s office - the State of the Union speech - and Wilson’s wife is punished by having her career and her life’s work destroyed (along with the destruction of a major CIA undercover asset in the front company of Brewster Jennings, Inc.).
Coincidence or conspiracy? That’s part of what U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was charged with discovering.
In the process, Fitzgerald found that somebody was repeatedly trying to “throw sand in the umpire’s eyes” - obstructing Fitzgerald’s investigation into the now-identified conspiracy to destroy a CIA asset as a form of political payback. That person obstructing the investigation into the conspiracy, Fitzgerald discovered, worked at the right hands of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney and was named Irving Lewis Libby.
Coincidence or conspiracy?
On January 26, 2007, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported that Libby was going to undertake an aggressive defense of his own role in what may be revealed as a larger criminal conspiracy centered in the White House. In essence, his defense would be that he was merely a low-level grunt, a “scapegoat” (”patsy” was the term used by a previous generation) for crimes committed by those above him:
White House anxiety is mounting over the prospect that top officials—including deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and counselor Dan Bartlett—may be forced to provide potentially awkward testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Both Rove and Bartlett have already received trial subpoenas from Libby’s defense lawyers, according to lawyers close to the case who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. … Cheney is expected to provide the most crucial testimony to back up Wells’s assertion, one of the lawyers close to the case said. The vice president personally penned an October 2003 note in which he wrote, “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the other.”
Libby’s lawyer, Theodore Wells, explicitly told the jury in his opening statement:
“Mr. Libby, you will learn, went to the vice president of the United States and met with the vice president in private. Mr. Libby said to the vice president, ‘I think the White House … is trying to set me up. People in the White House want me to be a scapegoat.’”
When Fitzgerald got Cheney’s current number two guy, David Addington, on the stand, he grilled Addington about what Cheney had written, one implication being that the outing of a CIA officer and her counterterrorism operation, Brewster Jennings Inc., was a crime that originated not just with the Vice President, but as a criminal conspiracy that originated with the President himself.
Wells handed Addington a copy of the note Cheney had written in September of 2003 and pointed out that the original handwritten text hadn’t said:
“not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others” but, instead Cheney had written:
“not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy this pres asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others.” (emphasis added for clarity)
Libby’s lawyer, Wells, ran Cheney’s assistant, Addington, through the memo:
Wells: “Can you make out what’s crossed out, Mr. Addington?”
Addington: “It says ‘the guy’ and then it says, ‘this Pres.’ and then that is scratched through.”
Wells: “OK, let’s start again. ‘Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy …’ and then what’s scratched through?”
Addington: “T-h-i-s space P-r-e-s, and then it’s got a scratch-through.”
Wells: “So it looks like ‘this Pres.?’”
Addington: “Yes sir.”
So here was the defense’s case: The President and Vice President of the United States conspired to cover up their own outing (through the proxy of their underlings) of a CIA officer and her undercover operation, damaging the intelligence apparatus of the United States and intimidating CIA officers worldwide, purely for political payback against Wilson and to intimidate CIA officers who may think of speaking out (or anybody related to a CIA officer who may think of speaking out).
Former President George H.W. Bush had once famously said: “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”
But now that Libby’s defense team had suggested in open court that this conspiracy to expose the name of a CIA source had originated with his son, the former President was conspicuously silent.
Half a year - from May 2006 to late January of 2007 - went by filled with reports that Libby’s lawyers were going to put Cheney under oath on the witness stand. Even Cheney himself said in a January 2007 interview with Wolf Blitzer: “I’m going to be a witness in that trial within a matter of weeks, I’m not going to discuss it.”
And then the third bomb dropped.
Suddenly, in the second week of February, 2007, Scooter Libby decided to lie down and let the steamroller of the criminal justice system roll all over him.
He wouldn’t ask Rove or Cheney to testify.
He wouldn’t call other witnesses from within the White House.
His lawyer wasn’t going to bring up the Cheney memo again.
Libby wouldn’t even take the stand in his own defense.
And it all happened just about the time Rove and Cheney would have been forced to testify in court under oath.
Coincidence or conspiracy?
The press was stunned. As reporter Andy Sullivan reported for Reuters on February 13, 2007:
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney will not testify as expected in a former top aide’s perjury trial that has exposed White House efforts to counter Iraq-war critics, the aide’s lawyers said on Tuesday. Defendant Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, likewise will not take the witness stand, his lawyers said as they abruptly prepared to wrap up their case on Wednesday.
From a legal defense point of view it made no sense. It was almost as if Libby didn’t care if he was convicted or not. He smiled a lot, and friends raised over $5 million for him. But he wasn’t going to offer a defense. Not even a word to the jury in his own defense.
In Sullivan’s Reuters article, he quoted George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley:
“Most jurors expect defendants to testify, and the failure to do so can lead to silent presumptions against them on credibility questions.”
The possibility that Libby’s decision not to bring Cheney or Rove to the stand but instead to simply roll over and legally die troubled many. Along with others on the radio and in print, I speculated at the time that in exchange for Libby not going forward with a defense - a virtual assurance that he would be convicted and sentenced to prison - Cheney and Bush had promised him a presidential pardon.
Such an explicit quid pro quo would, according to most constitutional scholars, represent a clear criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, a felony and an impeachable offense.
So here we have a new question:
First lying us into a war - we now know from people within the administration itself that it was a conspiracy.
Then destroying part of the CIA to cover up that first act of treason - a court has ruled that was a conspiracy.
And now the possibility that Libby was given the assurance that if he didn’t defend himself, he’d be taken care of, just as Libby’s defense was about to bring the White House onto the stand to testify under oath in open court.
Was it a coincidence or a conspiracy?
When Richard Nixon tried to stop judicial inquiries into his own crimes, Congress investigated and discovered that Nixon was part of a criminal conspiracy based in the White House. They responded with articles of impeachment, which read, in part (emphasis added):
In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that:
…Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.
The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan included one or more of the following:
making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;
withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;
approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counseling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings;
interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees; …
making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the executive branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct: or
endeavouring to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favoured treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony. …
Was Bush’s commutation of Libby’s imprisonment just days before it was to begin and after his appeals of it were exhausted simply a coincidence, or part of a conspiracy that reaches back to the first months of this year?
It appears that an entirely new crime - one that has not been investigated, exposed, or reported on at all - happened in late January or early February of this year.
Was Bush’s commutation of Libby’s jail time a coincidentally-timed act of mercy by a man known as brutally unmerciful, or an act of criminal conspiracy to conceal previous criminal conspiracies?
In the winter of early 2007, Did Bush, Cheney, or both, directly or through a co-conspirator, assure Libby that he would never have to serve jail time, and that he would not carry any criminal stain after Bush left office?
Was the timing of this commutation a coincidence, or part of a conspiracy to cover up other conspiracies, which have already been determined by a US Attorney to include both partisan and apparently illegal activities directed from within the White House?
The last time our nation confronted such a question, the nation’s press did their job and looked into it, while Congress did the job assigned it by the Constitution and launched an immediate investigation.
Today’s press, and this Congress, should do no less.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,” “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,” “We The People: A Call To Take Back America,” “What Would Jefferson Do?,” “Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It,” and “Cracking The Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision.”
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posted on July 14, 2007 05:15:46 AM new
Your progressive radio host is OUT OF TOUCH with reality. clue him in. The dem party is NOT supporting any call for impeachment.
posted on July 14, 2007 05:42:35 AM new
Just can't stay away , can ya, linduh ?
Since "clue" seems to be your new word of the day let me "clue" you in...the Democrats are not officially favoring impeachment but lots and lots of their bosses( taxpayers) are .
I think you should broaden your horizons past the DruggieLimbaughs and you'll see a pretty good grassroots groundswell of wanting to hold Cheney/bushit accountable for their actions.
I have neither said I'm for or against impeachment although I do have an opinion on what to do with these two amoral, bloodthirsty criminals....
posted on July 16, 2007 07:55:00 AM new
Obviously Linduh doesn't live in reality. Recent poll shows that 45% favor impeachment of Bush, while 46% don't. Obviously that is quite a high number favoring impeachment since it has become a mainstream topic. Cheney is even further in the toilet at 54% in favor to 40% against. Linduh seems to think her pretty boy president has no skeletons in his closet, clean as a whistle... but most americans know both Bush and Cheney are hiding everything, using "executive priveledge" as much as they can. She can continue to think it is only "wackos" out there chiming the impeachment bell, but the numbers simply don't lie.
Much of US favors Bush impeachment: poll
Jul 6 03:59 PM US/Eastern
Nearly half of the US public wants President George W. Bush to face impeachment, and even more favor that fate for Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a poll out Friday.
The survey by the American Research Group found that 45 percent support the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against Bush, with 46 percent opposed, and a 54-40 split in favor when it comes to Cheney.
The study by the private New Hampshire-based ARG canvassed 1,100 Americans by telephone July 3-5 and had an error margin of plus or minus three percentage points. The findings are available on ARG's Internet site.
The White House declined to comment on the poll, the latest bad news for a president who has seen his public opinion standings dragged to record lows by the unpopular war in Iraq.
The US Constitution says presidents and vice presidents can be impeached -- that is, formally charged by the House -- for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" by a simple majority vote.
Conviction by the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority, means removal from office.
Just two US presidents have been impeached: Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 and acquitted in 1999; Andrew Johnson was impeached and acquitted in 1868. Disgraced president Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 when a House impeachment vote appeared likely.
In late April, left-wing Representative Dennis Kucinich, a long-shot Democratic presidential hopeful, introduced a resolution calling for Cheney's impeachment. To date, the measure has nine listed co-sponsors and a 10th set to sign on when the House returns to work next week.
But Democratic leaders appear unlikely to pursue such a course.
posted on July 16, 2007 08:27:55 AM new
ROFLOL - polls, polls, polls.
And democrats/liberals whose OWN GUTLESS congress doesn't have the backbone/guts to go forward with an impeachment. All I can do is LAUGH. Their frustration must be sky high. They just don't have ANY grounds to do so. tsk tsk tsk
"Just two US presidents have been impeached: Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998."
THAT is what this constant childish 'chatter' is all about......revenge that they just can't get even for. LOL LOL
Article after article while screaming how many Americans want the President impeached say the same thing after they're done RANTING - "But Democratic leaders appear unlikely to pursue such a course."
Why? One because they have NO grounds for impeachment. Two, even IF they could find some phony charge they don't have the GUTS to act. As has been noted time and time again, the DEMOCRATIC party is nothing but TALK. TALK TALK TALK....never any action.
posted on July 16, 2007 09:52:48 AM new
Yep, polls, polls. Remember the exit poll results in the 2004 election. LOL
When a poller approaches me as to how I voted, or how I will vote, I tell them "none of your business".
Apparently so do a lot of others.
[ edited by etexbill on Jul 16, 2007 09:53 AM ]
