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Dave Lindorff: Impeachment, Like Spring, is in the Air
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Wed, 03/28/2007 - 4:28pm. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Dave Lindorff


It's time for impeachment to come out of the deep freeze.


For a year now, Democratic leaders such as Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), Rep.
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), and DNC head Howard Dean have
been working to tamp down the pressures to hold the president accountable
for his crimes and abuses of power by way of impeachment.


For her part, House Speaker Pelosi made it clear after the Democrats won the
House, she would tolerate no talk of impeachment, even reportedly
threatening one-time impeachment advocate Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) with the
denial of his cherished position as chair of the House Judiciary Committee
if he pushed ahead with or accepted bills of impeachment from other House
members.


House leaders and Democratic Party leaders also worked behind the scenes to
kill off grassroots attempts to follow Thomas Jefferson's alternative route
to impeachment by getting state legislatures to pass bicameral impeachment
resolutions. They strong-armed legislative leaders in the senates of both
Washington State and New Mexico to block efforts to put such resolutions to
a floor debate and vote in those two states, and have been working mightily
to block a similar grassroots campaign in Vermont.


But the Democratic Party's efforts to tamp down impeachment efforts are
coming unraveled, courtesy of the ongoing criminality of the Bush
administration, which seems hell-bent on aggrandizing as much executive
power as it possibly can before the clock runs out on Bush's second term of
office.


Democratic state committees, the top party organizations at the state level,
in Oregon and Vermont, have overwhelmingly passed resolutions calling on the
House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings. In Vermont, 38
towns -- roughly a third of those holding annual town meetings this past
month -- voted impeachment resolutions (only six were rejected), and an
effort continues to move forward in both houses of that state's legislature
to introduce and pass a Jeffersonian impeachment resolution to send to the
House in Washington. Other efforts are underway in New Jersey and Maine.

Republican Senator and potential presidential dark horse Chuck Hagel of
Nebraska has publicly stated that impeachment is a possibility, given the
president's arrogant rejection of public or congressional accountability
with regard to the war in Iraq and other issues.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has openly talked of submitting a bill of
impeachment.

What's missing in all this has been media attention. In fact, until lately,
the media have pretty much only reported about impeachment in the negative,
running stories when an impeachment resolution gets blocked by a state
legislature, but not when it gets backed by a legislative committee, or by a
Democratic state party organization.

There has not been a scientific poll asking about impeachment sentiment
since last October, when Newsweek Magazine published a poll showing that an
astonishing 51 percent of Americans favored impeachment -- half of those
people even saying it should be a priority for Congress. Now things may be
starting to change. Sen. Hagel's comments on the possibility of impeachment,
first made in a Vanity Fair magazine profile, were reported on ABC, and
impeachment advocate John Nichols was interviewed about impeachment and
Hagel's comment on MSNBC. CNN also ran a story.

That's not much, but it's an indication the ground is shifting.

With the White House pushing forward with a new war-marketing campaign --
this time against Iran -- and given mounting evidence of new White House
crimes, from the political firing of federal prosecutors and the abusive use
of national security letters by the FBI to spy on tens of thousands of
Americans, to the disaster of the show trials in Guantanamo, to the lying by
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to evidence of both President Bush's and
Vice President Cheney's involvement in the outing of and obstruction of
justice into the investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame,
to the escalation of the war in Iraq and to the lying about and enforced
manipulation of government evidence on global warming, the American people
are getting completely fed up with the Bush administration.

A recent poll found that as lame as it has been in challenging the Bush
agenda over the last six years, the Democratic Party has now become the
favored choice of 50 percent of Americans, while support for the Republican
Party has fallen to only 35 percent -- barely higher than the paltry 30
percent who still cling to their support of the president himself.

It would seem to be only a matter of time before Pelosi and the rest of the
Democratic Party leadership will be forced to open the floodgates and permit
the filing of impeachment bills.

The arguments made against impeachment -- it would be "divisive," it would
interfere with more "pressing matters" in Congress, it would mean making the
almost universally loathed Cheney president, and it would "hurt Democrats"
in 2008 -- are all looking increasingly shop-warn and contrived.

As the Bush crimes against the public, the Republic, the law, and
Constitution mount, the Democratic defenders of the president against
impeachment are increasingly looking simply cynical and ridiculous.

There is a kind of seesaw effect at work here, where the weight of
presidential power and prestige, combined with Democratic cowardice, has
kept one side firmly planted on the ground, while critics of Bush crimes and
constitutional abuses have remained stranded up in the air. But as the
weight of the evidence of Bush administration criminality, arrogance, and
unconstitutional actions have mounted, and as more and more citizens have
lost faith in the government, the beam has been tilting. It won't be long
before it is the administration and the Democratic Party leadership who find
themselves dangling and without support.

At that point, Pelosi and the DNC will have to surrender to the will of the
grassroots, and step aside for the ensuing stampede of impeachment bills.

Impeachment, like spring, is in the air.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and
columnist. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net and at
www.counterpunch.org. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is
"The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George
W. Bush from Office" (St. Martin's Press, 2006).