Congress must hold the Vice President accountable. You can hold Congress accountable. Call or fax your representative today!
Today Rep. Dennis Kucinich (photo) will introduce a resolution to impeach Vice President Richard Cheney as a privileged motion. It’s highly likely there will be a counter-motion to table voting on the resolution. Tabling usually means the resolution is never voted on. If the resolution doesn’t go to the House floor, we won’t know our representative’s position on impeachment. Please contact your Congressional representative and urge him/her not to table H.R. 333.
Why I feel so strongly about impeachment: This weekend I read Phillip Cunningham’s America Cannot Be Said to Be Good at the group blog, Informed Comment Global Affairs: “George W. Bush may indeed be the worst president ever, and Dick Cheney the worst vice-president imaginable but that does not exonerate the American people because Americans have the constitutional right and responsibility to remove miscreants from office.” [emphasis mine]
Cunningham compares Bush-Cheney’s America with Japan leading up to and during World War II, finding similarities in the…[W]illful disregard of international law, the pursuit of diplomacy by force and failure to account for war criminality.”
Cunningham concludes: “Just as it should be acknowledged that the people of Japan share a certain culpability in Tokyo’s terrible war, a war that ravaged Asia and eventually Japan itself, Americans have to own up to Iraq. But it can also be said in defense of the average Japanese in the days after Pearl Harbor that there was much they didn’t know and couldn’t talk about; --the media was completely censored and the Kempeitai dealt brutally with domestic opposition.
"When the day of reckoning comes for ordinary Americans to assess their culpability in the debacle of Iraq, a hideous and heinous war fought in view of a free media and in the context of relatively unfettered freedom to protest, what will the excuse be? [emphasis mine]
"If Bush is unjust, if he is, as they say, the worst ever, then the free people who support, tolerate and enable him cannot be said to be good.”
Cheney is worse than Bush. On the day of reckoning, I, an ordinary American, do not want to feel responsible for the Iraq war, torture, and all the other “high crimes and misdemeanors” of Vice President Cheney.
Getting into action: My letter to my representative is here. If you know your representative’s name , go here. If you don’t, enter your zip code here. If you don’t know your ZIP + 4, go here, then back to here.
(photo of Rep. Dennis Kucinich CommonDreams.org)
3 comments:
Long overdue!
Gail. We pay taxes. We're all guilty.
My brother may very well go to Kuwait and likely be making shipments into Iraq. He could die.
Still. I pay taxes. So does he.
I think that it is not possible for anyone who has remained an American over the past seven years, to escape the curse that has been leveled on this land by this administration.
It would seem that no penance is great enough. I think this is why such a profound ignorance is cultivated by the citizens of this country.
Here's what NYT had to say:
WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 — It is hard to know which effort has longer odds, the bid by Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, to become president of the United States, or his bid to unseat Vice President Dick Cheney by impeaching him.
Both efforts got a brief burst of publicity on Tuesday when Mr. Kucinich brought his bill to impeach Mr. Cheney to the House floor and, with the surprise help of Republicans aiming to embarrass Democratic Congressional leaders, nearly succeeded in securing an hour of debate.
After a motion to table Mr. Kucinich’s bill failed, the majority leader, Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, stepped in with a motion to refer the bill back to the House Judiciary Committee. That motion succeeded, by a near-party-line vote of 218 to 194, and spared the Democrats a potentially embarrassing distraction.
House Republicans initially opposed the effort to debate Mr. Kucinich’s impeachment measure, and briefly there were 290 votes in favor of tabling it.
But then the Republicans sensed an opportunity to irritate the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, who has said the Democrats have no interest in impeaching Mr. Cheney or President Bush over the Iraq war. The Republicans began changing their votes, and by the end, the tally was 251 to 162 not to table it, with 165 Republicans voting no.
Janie
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