Newspaper logo  
 
 
Local News & Opinion

07.03 Notice for Extension of Unemployment Insurance Benefits

Travel

07.02 A Cost-Saving Way to Travel: Rent a House

Books, Arts & Education
Letters

Ref. : Letters to the editor

Open Letters:

06.30 An Open Letter to Barack Obama

Health & Environment
Media Watching

07.17 Corporate Media Blackouts Continue as Iran War Looms and Impeachment Moves Ahead

07.17 The Pentagon and the Hunt for Black Gold

07.16 Washington Post's McCain-Friendly Poll

07.15 You Can’t Tell a Magazine by Its Cover Or A Candidate by His Rhetoric

07.09 The Forgotten: Somalia's American-Made Road to Perdition

07.03 Press distorts Clark’s comments

06.30 Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'

06.27 Robert McChesney's The Political Economy of Media (Part II)

06.25 Robert McChesney's The Political Economy of Media (Part I)

06.20 Remembering Russert

US Politics, Policy & Culture

07.18 Making Americans Unsafe

07.18 I Was a Victim of the Government’s Absurd and Over-Hyped War on Terror

07.15 Thinking About Safety

07.15 The High Cost of Bush's Iraq Gambit

07.11 McCain's Nomination - A Possible September Surprise?

07.07 Is Barack Obama Patriotic? Is Any Politician?

07.07 Obama's FISA Statement is a Mess (Just like his Stand on Faith-based Programs)

07.07 Campaign Notes: Of Flip-Flops and Fly-Bys

07.07 Supreme Court, Inc.: Supremely Pro-Business

07.03 The Real Meaning of the Fourth of July

07.03 Three Amigos: Bush, McCain, Obama Draw a Blood-Red Line on Iran

07.02 Rep. Ron Paul Assails Congress's "Virtual Iran War Resolution

07.02 How Ignorant Are We?

06.28 Primary Season Over, Barack Channels Hillary

06.27 Senate Overwhelmingly Approves Bill to Fund Iraq War Until Mid-2009

06.27 Defending the President as Tyrant

06.25 Critical Malfunction: Misreading Gore Vidal

06.23 Campaign Finance Reform Has Failed

06.23 Thinking About Flip-Flops

06.23 Heat Waves: Burning Off the Fog of the FISA Fiasco

06.23 Alarm over 'Unfair' Campaign Money

06.23 The Supreme Court, Habeas, John Yoo and Murdoch's Wall Street Journal

06.20 Keeping America Safe from Child "Terrorists"

06.20 SuperCorridor Defeat? Don't Bet On It

US “High Crimes” & Misdemeanors

07.19 'Justifying' Torture: Two Big Lies

07.18 Torture As Official US Policy

07.16 Bush Asserts Exec Privilege; Blocks DOJ From Releasing CIA Leak Documents

07.16 Impeachment Hearings: A Win is a Win

07.15 Torture for the Torturers

07.14 Imperial Wizards: The Nangarhar Massacre and U.S. Plans for Central Asia

07.12 Kucinich Pushes on Impeachment

07.11 Disorderly Conduct: Subverting the Bipartisan Paradigm on Iraq

07.10 Mukasey: Bush's New 'Mr. Cover-up'

07.09 Legitimizing Permanent Occupation of Iraq

07.08 Buchanan, MacDonogh, Pilger Books Explode Illusion Of American Exceptionalism

07.07 Bush-Cheney Crony Got Iraq Oil Deal

07.07 Keeping Count (When Ours Goes Down, Theirs Goes Up)

07.02 Iraq Oil Deals Fulfill Cheney's Goals

07.02 Bush's 'Wonderland' Logic

06.30 Operation Horse's Head: U.S. Raid Sends Message on Iraq "Agreement"

06.30 Invisible Hand: Washington Role in Iraq Oil Deal Revealed

06.27 It Was Oil, All Along

06.27 Big Dog, Little Tail: The American Elite Resolves on War With Iran

06.26 A Totally Lawless Regime

06.23 Top Dems Hand Bush Key Victories

06.23 Democrats Legalize Bush's Crimes

06.20 Torturegate: Truth, But No Consequences

06.20 Bomb Iran? What's to Stop Us?

Economics & Business

07.11 Running on Empty

07.10 A Work Force Betrayed

07.08 Paul Krugman and Blindness About the War and the Economy

07.07 Thinking About Turnarounds

06.30 Thinking about Dependence

06.26 Health-Care Crisis Endangers Economy

International

07.17 Renunciation and Escalation: Conflicting Tides in the Terror War

07.16 Maliki's 'Timetable' Shakes Iraq Debate

07.16 Drought and Israeli Policy Threaten West Bank Water Security

07.14 Enabling Tyranny—Brigitte Bardot And Other Victims

07.14 Duce Bags: Italy Leads Fascist Revanche in Western Democracies

We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
Google
This site Web
 
  A Widening Chasm Between House Democrats and the Voters on Impeachment
Newspaper logo

COMMENTARY:

A Widening Chasm Between House Democrats and the Voters on Impeachment

by Dave Lindorff
Polls have consistently shown that the broader public also wants the president and vice president impeached.
The divide between Democratic leaders contemplating their re-election prospects in 2008 and rank-and-file Democrats is becoming a chasm--one so wide that Congressional Democrats may soon find it hard to straddle it.

The issue is impeachment.

So far, Democrats in Congress and at the top of the party hierarchy, out of touch with public sentiment and worried that impeachment could hurt them with "independents"--whom they mistakenly consider to stand somehow "in between" Democrats and Republicans--have been following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's vow that for the 110th Congress, "impeachment is off the table." They've been doing more than that: they have been actively working to tamp down, and even to crush, impeachment campaigns in the states. For example, in the state of Washington, an effort to get the state to pass a joint legislative resolution which would have compelled the Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings was derailed after the Democratic leadership dispatched two of the state's leading federal elected officials, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Jay Inslee, to press legislative leaders to block a floor vote. Similar pressure doomed efforts that might have passed in the legislatures of New Mexico and Vermont (The Vermont Senate did pass the resolution).

Meanwhile, down at the state and local level, Democratic Party committee after Democratic Party committee is voting out resolutions calling for impeachment. The latest Democratic Party organization to call for impeachment of both Bush and Cheney is the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which at its state convention on Saturday, May 19, voted out a strong measure calling on the state’s elected representatives in Washington to investigate Bush and Cheney for misleading the nation into war, for authorizing torture, and for warrantless wiretapping. The message concludes: "If the investigation supports the charges, vote to impeach both Bush and Cheney as provided in the Constitution."

Massachusetts Democrats thus join California's huge Democratic Party, which passed a similar resolution less than a month ago at its annual convention, in what was widely perceived as a slap at Pelosi, who represents a district in San Francisco.

To date, 14 state Democratic Parties have now called for impeachment.

But that's only part of the story. Vermont's state senate has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for impeachment. Similar resolutions are being considered in the legislatures of 17 states. Over 80 cities, towns and counties have passed impeachment resolutions, as have at least that many town and county Democratic Party organizations, even in conservative areas such as Berkes and Chester County in Pennsylvania.

Many of these resolutions have been the work of the Progressive Democrats of America organization. Others have been promoted by ad hoc groups.

The impeachment resolutions, which have also been passed by Democratic Parties in so-called "red" states like Nevada and North Carolina, are a clear sign that impeachment is the will of the party's rank and file.

Polls have consistently shown that the broader public also wants the president and vice president impeached.

In October 2006, Newsweek published a scientific poll disclosing that 51 percent of Americans favored impeachment, half of them as a top priority.

That poll, of course, was taken before Democrats had gained control of the House and Senate, and also before Bush, ignoring the anti-war message of voters in November, decided to increase the number of US troops in his misbegotten and calamitous war in Iraq.

Another more recent poll, taken by a right-wing organization called InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion, found that 39 percent of respondents favored impeachment of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney together. The percentage for impeachment would almost certainly have been significantly higher if impeaching the two men had been offered as separate options in the poll.

Recent news developments are only making impeachment more popular with the public at large. The worsening Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and the President’s intransigence and obsession with continuing the slaughter of innocents and the sacrifice of Americans, has driven his popularity down to 28 percent, and the vice president’s to below 9 percent. The prosecutors firing scandal is taking down the attorney general, while exposing the outlines of one aspect of a six-year-long White House-orchestrated campaign to undermine the democratic election process using control of the justice system. And it is now becoming clear that the president's illegal National Security Agency spying program has been so outrageous an assault on Americans’ civil liberties that even then Attorney General John Ashcroft, himself a walking threat to the Bill of Rights, refused to sign on, despite his being pressed to do so from a hospital bed.

At this point, the Congressional leadership, including Pelosi and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), really need to start worrying that they may start looking ridiculous. Indeed, the Detroit City Council a few days ago passed a resolution calling on Congress to begin impeachment proceedings, and one of those voting for the resolution was Conyers’ own wife, herself a Detroit alderwoman!

Clearly the president has authorized an illegal spying campaign, and has already been declared to have committed a felony by a Detroit federal judge who tried the issue last summer. Clearly too, he has grossly abused his power by claiming to have “unitary executive power” as commander in chief in the war on terror, and that this power, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, gives him the authority to ignore and invalidate laws duly passed by the Congress. Finally, he clearly misled the Congress about the war, and clearly authorized the practice of torture against American captives.

Equally clearly, if the president is not impeached, Congress will be telegraphing that the next president, whomever that may be, can feel free to abuse the law and the Constitution in the same manner as the current president has been doing.

How can there not be impeachment proceedings!

None of Bush's and Cheney's grave crimes and abuses of power even require anything significant in the way of hearings. They could be submitted as bills of impeachment and voted on by the House Judiciary Committee and by the full Congress tomorrow, if there was the will to do so.

Instead, the Democratic leadership continues to dither, continues to permit the president to ignore subpoenas, continues to interfere with grassroots efforts to pass impeachment resolutions, and continues to ignore even the bill of impeachment against the vice president, House Resolution 333, submitted a month ago by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), even as it has now gained three co-sponsors.

The chasm is clearly widening between the leadership of the Democratic Party and the voters.

It may end up swallowing them up, come November 2008.


About the author: Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, 2006, which is now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.


Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

This story was published on May 22, 2007.
 

Public Service Ads:
Verifiable Voting in Maryland