A mini-war broke out in the right-wing blogosphere yesterday, as bloggers Jim Hoft and Dan Riehl laughably claimed that Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), who is running for the GOP Senate nomination in Delaware, "voted to impeach" President Bush in 2008.
It doesn't take a lot of Googling to figure out that this claim is absurdly wrong. Castle never "voted to impeach" Bush. In fact, he voted -- along with 23 other Republicans and 227 Democrats -- to send Rep. Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution to the House Judiciary Committee where the measure faced "certain death" in order to "avoid having to debate and vote on impeaching" Bush, according to The Boston Globe. The Globe further said that the vote "scuttled" Kucinich's impeachment proposal. And The Washington Post reported prior to the vote that Democrats "expect
to table the resolution by referring it to the Judiciary Committee, where they expect it to die." Here's what CNN reported at the time*:
An attempt by Rep. Dennis Kucinich to impeach President Bush was kicked into legislative no-man's land by members of his own party Wednesday.
The House voted 251-166 to send the Ohio Democrat's impeachment resolution to committee, a maneuver that allows the Democratic leadership to freeze the measure indefinitely.
The vote largely followed partisan lines, with 225 Democrats voting on Kucinich's request to send the measure to committee for consideration.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said she would not support a resolution calling for Bush's impeachment, saying such a move was unlikely to succeed and would be divisive.
All 166 votes in favor of opening up a House impeachment debate came from Republicans, apparently eager to bring up the vote immediately and paint Democrats as political creatures in a time of serious issues.
It's plainly clear what Castle and 23 of his Republican colleagues voted for -- to the let the measure die in the Judiciary Committee. Their votes actually did the opposite of what Hoft and Riehl claimed -- they "scuttled" the impeachment resolution.
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http://mediamatters.org/blog/201009140019
I hope RW swing voters fall for this one. :rofl: