Gene Racz: Don't Allow the Impeachment of President Bush to Fall off the Table

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From CommonDreams:

Published on Monday, January 8, 2007 by the East Brunswick, New Jersey Home News Tribune
Don't Allow Impeachment of President Bush to Fall off the Table
by Gene Racz

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says "impeachment is off the table." Former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, John Dean, speculates that even if the House of Representatives were to draw up and pass articles of impeachment on President George W. Bush, the effort would lack enough votes in the Senate where the trial to convict would require a two-thirds majority vote.

My friends and colleagues say it's too late into Bush's term to impeach him.

Impossible. Implausible. Impractical.

My reply? Hold hearings, assemble evidence and pursue impeachment in earnest.

Impertinent? I don't think so, and neither does a growing number of American citizens, including Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who introduced House Resolution 635 back in December of 2005 calling on Congress to do just such a thing. It has roughly 30 co-sponsors and growing.

The resolution cites: "the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics" as reasons to form a committee to investigate the President's behavior for evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Others have noted Bush's disgusting response, or nonresponse, to Hurricane Katrina and his illegal wiretaps as further grounds for impeachment. Several local resolutions have been passed around the country, notably in Vermont and San Francisco (Pelosi's home district) calling for impeachment.

These efforts look like more of a growing groundswell than a grinding to a halt.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Nixon impeachment process was that, at that outset, impeachment also seemed "off the table." But by late 1973, the flames of public indignation had been stoked by several months of Senate Watergate Committee hearings and Nixon's attempt to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. When the Supreme Court ordered the release of Nixon's tapes showing his attempt to cover up the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, Nixon resigned as near certain, bipartisan impeachment stared him in the face. .....(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0108-20.htm

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1. Don't be in a hurry...we need to investigate

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