"The Suddenly Impeachable Mr. Cheney"

This is my third post featuring an article by Jon Spitz, who has written a column for The Mendocino County Observer for a couple of years. Jon consistently rights well on a variety of subjects, as is evident here and here.

”The Suddenly Impeachable Mr. Cheney,” published today in The Mendocino County Observer, is the best description I’ve seen of what happened in the House of Representatives on November 6th when Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced H. R. 333, calling for the impeachment of Vice President Richard Cheney. The resolution is now H. Res. 799.

Jon clarifies the confusing trail of votes resulting from the maneuvering by both Republicans and Democrats. The end result is that the House voted to refer the resolution to the House Judiciary Committee. The resolution had already been submitted to the committee by Rep. Kucinich last April, but Rep. John Conyers, chair of the committee, did not act on it by initiating an investigation.

Jon also describes the three articles of impeachment in H. Res. 799, compares them to the articles on impeachment against Nixon, and suggests additional articles that the House Judiciary Committee should add to H. Res. 799. In Jon’s opinion, these articles would have a better chance of being accepted by the House than the ones Rep. Kucinich came up with.

Because there’s no deadline for the Judiciary Committee to act on H. Res. 799, Jon ends his article with a call to action. Otherwise, he, along with many others including myself, believes that H. Res. 799 will never get to the House floor.

I urge you to read the full article.

(photo of Jon in front of his home)

Kucinich's impeachment resolution is in the hands of the House Judiciary Committee- what can we citizens do?

Late yesterday, The New York Times reported that the effort to table H.R. 333, the resolution to impeach Vice President Cheney, failed largely because the Republicans decided they wanted the resolution to go to a House floor vote to “…[I]rritate Speaker Nancy Pelosi …who has said that the Democrats have no interest in impeaching Mr. Cheney or President Bush.

"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 218-194, and spared the Democrats a potentially embarrassing distraction." [emphases mine]

Wait a minute! “Democrats have no interest in impeaching Mr. Cheney or President Bush”? Sending the resolution to the House Judiciary Committee is supposed to spare the “Democrats a potentially embarrassing distraction”?

The final sentence of the Times’ report: “And the bill has been referred to the Judiciary Committee where it is likely to remain for the rest of the year.”

We need to remind the House Judiciary Committee members that it only took five months to impeach and acquit President Clinton. *

Here’s my plan: bombard the House Judiciary Committee members with calls, e-mails, faxes, and letters. Did you know you can have a letter hand-delivered to your representative for only $8.95? If he/she is on the Judiciary Committee, go to Congress.org Advocacy Express (scroll down to find it) and follow the directions (thanks to Barbara Temple for telling me about this).

Even if your representative isn’t on the House Judiciary Committee, you can contact the members here. Or you can send an e-mail to the entire committee here. Lean on the chair of the committee, Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (photo). I recall that he was for impeachment before he was against it.

*Impeach the President - The Case Against Bush and Cheney, Chapter 1, p. 15, Impeachment: The People’s Nuclear Option, by Judith Volkhart, Esq. Regarding the short time it took for Congress to handle Clinton’s impeachment, Volkhart added that it proves…”that with sufficient motivation our elected officials can move quickly on matters of impeachment.” [emphasis mine]

(photo of John Conyers from the Judiciary Committee website)

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)