Good Friday noon,
Impeachment talk is back in the air. On Tuesday, a bunch of Republicans (who thought it would embarrass the Democrats) almost brought about a floor vote on an impeachment resolution against Vice Pres. Cheney by Rep. Dennis Kucinich. The Dem leadership got the resolution referred to the House Judiciary Committee instead. The leftier wing of the Democratic is upset that the allegedly wimpy leadership won’t go for it.
Please just remember this: It would require 67 votes in the Senate to remove either Pres. Bush or Vice Pres. Cheney, and presumably those that favor the removal of either one of them understand that it wouldn’t do much practical good unless both were impeached, convicted and removed.
67 votes. There are 50 Democrats in the Senate. In thinking about whether you favor this idea, you must consider whether it is worth it knowing that the chances are almost nil that Bush and Cheney can be removed before the end of their term, now 14 months away.
In July, when a Bill Moyers broadcast also created a moment of public discussion about the impeachment option, I put together a primer on impeachment. Black Ink wasn’t launched yet. The piece ran on the Minnesota Monitor. But if you missed it and believe, as I do, that it’s good to know the basics and the history on matters like this, it’s available here.
Back then, Kucinich had not specified the grounds on which he proposed to impeach Cheney. From the L.A. Times coverage of Tuesday’s House floor action, here are the grounds:
The resolution said that Cheney, “in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president,” had “purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests.”
The 11-page resolution also charged that Cheney purposely deceived the nation about an alleged relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda and has also “openly threatened aggression against the Republic of Iran absent any real threat to the United States.”
And here’s Kucinich’s version of the issue, from an interview with Democracy Now.
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Impeachment would be time consuming, but as long as the Republicans are blocking everything anyhow, the Senate has time. The Bush administration has been the most secretive administration in history, and impeachment would be a way of getting out into the open a lot of stuff from the members of Cheney’s energy task force to the role of Rove in DOJ prosecutions and a whole lot of stuff in between. Whether Bush and Cheney are ultimately removed from office or not, it is important that the congress and the people know exactly what they did.
I agree with John Sherman. The issue is not whether there are the votes to remove Cheney and Bush but whether there are the votes to impeach. The public record cries out for impeachment. Let those who vote against impeachment be judged by the next election and by history.