Impeachment - Congress

1st hearing, impeachment - Repugs can find no defence for Bush

LeftDemocrat — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:24:16 -0400

Am watching on C-Span.org right now, and certainly the vast majority of
the panelists are in favor of impeachment (with two notable, and
derisive, exceptions, explained below)

It's good to see the
House Judiciary proceeding as it should, finally, on this matter. If
the Democratically-controlled Congress loses its steam now, the Dems
aren't fit to govern us.

Meanwhile, it was instructive to
watch the Republican Minority fail to find any decent ground to defend
Bush-Cheney, today. The Republican Minority couldn't find a leg to
stand on, and their witnesses came across as either fascist or kooky
(more below).

These panelists, meanwhile, were absolutely fabulous:

Bruce Fein, author of Constitutional Peril (forthcoming)
Bob
Barr, former congressman, presently Libertarian candidate for U.S.
President (deserves our vote more than Obama, who proved a traitor on
FISA)
Walter Jones (R-NC)
Elizabeth Holtzman, former congresswoman, author of The Impeachment of George Bush
Brad Miller (D-NC)
Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)
Elliot Abrams, veteran and chairman of Vets for Peace
Rocky Andersen, former mayor of Salt Lake City
and of course,
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

I
particularly liked Holtzman's emphasis that there is no remedy, no way
to safeguard the U.S. Constitution and protect the American people from
the tyranny of the U.S. executive branch, than to IMPEACH, IMPEACH WITHOUT DELAY.

Fein
makes me a Constitutional fundamentalist. Our founders had predicted
this very predicament, and explicitly foresaw the need for IMPEACHMENT
of the President, in these circumstances.

Congress DECIDES what
constitutes an impeachable offense, and there are is opportunity here
to set a precedent reining in the overwrought ambitious of warmongering
presidents and vice-presidents (as well as secretaries of defense,
secretaries of state, or attorney generals, etc.)

IT IS
EXTREMELY IMPORTANT IN MY MIND TO LIMIT THE IMPERIALIST TENDENCIES of
the likes of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Ashcroft-Gonzalez-Mukasey.

IT
IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO RE-ASSERT THE POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY that
defines limits on the executive branch, by impeaching, and then
indicting and prosecuting, when the time is ripe, the whole coterie of
executive-branch officials and administrators, starting with Bush and
Cheney, before they abscond to their hideaway in the mountains of
Paraguay.

Meanwhile, I found the witnesses called by the Republican minority to be either dangerous or laugable.

Steven
Presser, law professor at Northwester University -- fascist, pure and
simple. He would have been happy defending Goering, at the Nuremberg
trials; the Goering who eventually was hanged for crimes against
peace. Presser spoke unremitting evil from his mouth, every time he
was given the occasion.

George Rabkin, law professor at George
Mason University, muddle-headed woolly-thinking witness. His entire
defense was to claim for Bush a defense (not in law, either) that his
misdeeds are permissible in a time of war (the presumed open-ended
so-called 'war on terror' being the purported war in question).

So
simple to refute: U.S. Congress has the right to declare war; U.S.
Congress never did declare a war; if it is NOT wartime, then Rabkin's
line of thinking doesn't have any validity, and in point of fact, the
U.S. president has betrayed both Congress and the U.S. Constitution. Without impeachment, the president and vice-president's war-making will remain unchecked and unbalanced.

Unimpressive were the following:

Fred A.I. Schwarz, New York Univ, Brennan Center for Justice -- he conceded that impeachment should have already been done, and yet, despite the clamor for justice and his role supposedly working for justice, he trotted out the 'too late' argument.

If
it's really too late, viz. because of the tarrying of Pelosi and the
wavering of Conyers, then they, and the other members of the Judiciary
Committee obstructing impeachment so far in this session of Congress,
have failed to protect us from domestic enemies of the Constitution,
they have failed to protect us from zealots like the neo-cons keen on
war, and failed to protect us from the neo-absolutist imperialist view
of the presidency pursued illegally by Cheney. It's not too late, if
the Judiciary Committee would simply proceed with all due diligence in the defense of the U.S. Constitution, investigating abuses of power that seem to be incontrovertibly proven already.

And also unimpressive among the Majority members were:
Mel Watt (D-NC) - a stinker, for waffling through his alloted time. North Carolina should be embarrassed.
Zoe Lofgren (D-CA16) - does not seem to understand that Bush-Cheney provoked the confrontation in Iraq

And among the Minority:
Gohmert (R- ) - ignorant, through and through. I despair that Constitutional issues are in the hands of the likes of Gohmert.

Meanwhile, impressive among the Majority were:
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
and
Robert Wexler (D-FL)

IMPEACH, IMPEACH WITHOUT DELAY. YOU HAVE SEVEN DAYS. THE CONSTITUTIONAL CLOCK IS RUNNING.

http://impeachok1.org/SMF/index.php?topic=9255.msg11184#msg11184

Vote for war funding -- It's time to impeach Norm Dicks

mrwitticism — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:17:11 -0400

Watching the coverage of the war funding bill on C-Span (a channel I never otherwise watch) I was sickened and disgusted by our so-called representatives betraying the trust of the American people, who want an end this war. I called the office of Norm Dicks this morning (talking to the person who answered the phone; Dicks was in a meeting supposedly) and told them I was his constituent, and I'm against a yes vote on this illegal, immoral war. Once again, this is something I don't normally do, calling my Congressional representative, but I felt compelled to act, hoping that I could make a difference with my phone call. FAT CHANCE! Dicks had his mind made up not to vote how those who elected him wanted. So as far as I'm concerned HE'S FIRED! My only question is, how do we get started on removing him from office?

Lowest congressional approval ratings in history. What are the Dems doing?

archangelred — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:39:32 -0500

Congressional spending is out of control, the country is broke. A war is being wage by polititions not soldiers. Soldiers win! Polititions make us look like idiots. Impeach them all and start over. Pay cuts for congress and higher taxes for all elected officials. Hybrid cars not limos, greyhound not private jets, mandatory drug testing would be a good start for all of them!!!!

Steve Novick, OR-Sen candidate, joins call for impeachment

amgS93 — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:50:15 -0500

January 2, 2008 -- Today Steve launched a new feature on his campaign's website, urging his supporters to join the national petition to demand the House begin hearings on an impeachment resolution of Vice President Dick Cheney. Steve declared his support for impeachment investigations in September 2007, citing false statements leading up to the war and the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in apparent contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

As Steve said in a statement today:

"Representatives Wexler, Gutierrez and Baldwin are right to demand that the Congress not ignore this solemn responsibility. Impeachment should never be taken up lightly or for political gain, but in this case the evidence is compelling. Each week, it seems, we are presented with another example of how this Administration, and this Vice President in particular, consider themselves above the law and accountable to no one. If this Congress can't or won't hold this President accountable, who will?"

Novick for Senate
http://www.novickforsenate.com

Silicon Valley Impeachment Coalition: CA 13, 14, 15

TheOPatriot — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:55:28 -0400

The Silicon Valley Impeachment Coalition has been active and doing actions since Nov 06. We usually vigil for impeachment on Fridays 5:30-7pm at the corner of Castro and El Camino in Mountain View. Every Saturday afternoon we hold an Impeachment Central meeting at the San Jose Peace Center 48 S. 7th St.

We have organized and carried out meetings with Honda and Eshoo, (working on Lofgren) and are putting together town hall meetings now.

Oct 25th 2007 we have a Green Talk re: Impeachment & Upholding the Constitution in Mountain View.

Probably the easiest way to connect with the group is to go to our Meetup.com site, http://impeachbush.meetup.com/404/

Come join us to uphold and defend our constitution!

TheOPatriot

Kucinich to Submit Your Impeachment Petitions to Congress

CausalCrunch — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:20:02 -0400

In a meeting Thursday, July 26th, 2007, members of ImpeachForPeace.org and After Downing Street met with Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his Washington DC office to present the Congressman with thousands of "Do It Yourself Impeachments" collected over the past few months. DIY Impeachment Memorials are actually a little known and rarely used part of the Rules of the House of Representatives ("Jefferson's Manual"), which empowers individual citizens to initiate the impeachment against any federal official themselves. These Memorials support the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

During our meeting, Congressman Kucinich agreed to place all signers of the DIY Impeachment Memorials specifically referencing Cheney into the Congressional record. Rep. Kucinich also agreed to enter into the record the names of signers of regular petitions to impeach Cheney. Because there is a limit to the number of pages that a representative can submit to the Congressional Record each day, Rep. Kucinich stated he will continue to submit petitions every day until all the names are submitted. The most powerful statement for impeachment is the submission of a Memorial, however, so if you have not yet sent a Memorial for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney to ImpeachForPeace.org, please do so! Go to http://impeachforpeace.org/ImpeachNow.html and download the Memorial. Then send it to the address listed on the cover letter.

"Jefferson's Manual" is an interpretive guide to parliamentary procedure, and is included (along with the Constitution) in the bound volumes of the Rules of the House of Representatives. It is ratified by each congress (including the current one), and has been updated continuously through the history of our democracy. The section covering impeachment lists the acceptable vehicles for bringing impeachment motions to the floor of the House.

Before the House Judiciary Committee can put together the Articles of Impeachment, someone must initiate the impeachment procedure. Most often, this occurs when members of the House pass a resolution. Another method outlined in the manual, however, is for individual citizens to submit a memorial for impeachment.

Since then, Kucinich held a press conference informing the public of his plan.

Enter your name into the Congressional Record

For more on the DIY Impeachment process, see this YouTube video

A Widening Chasm Between Congressional Democrats and Voters on Impeachment

dlindorff — Mon, 21 May 2007 22:08:39 -0400

The divide between Democratic leaders contemplating their re-election prospects in 2008 and rank-and-file Democrats is becoming a chasm--one so wide that Congressional Democrats may soon find it hard to straddle it.

The issue is impeachment.

So far, Democrats in Congress and at the top of the party hierarchy, out of touch with public sentiment and worried that impeachment could hurt them with "independents"--whom they mistakenly consider to stand somehow "in between" Democrats and Republicans--have been following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's vow that for the 110th Congress, "impeachment is off the table." They've been doing more than that: they have been actively working to tamp down, and even to crush, impeachment campaigns in the states. For example, in the state of Washington, an effort to get the state to pass a joint legislative resolution which would have compelled the Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings was derailed after the Democratic leadership dispatched two of the state's leading federal elected officials, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Jay Inslee, to press legislative leaders to block a floor vote. Similar pressure doomed efforts that might have passed in the legislatures of New Mexico and Vermont (The Vermont Senate did pass the resolution).

Meanwhile, down at the state and local level, Democratic Party committee after Democratic Party committee is voting out resolutions calling for impeachment. The latest Democratic Party organization to call for impeachment of both Bush and Cheney is the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which at its state convention on Saturday, May 19, voted out a strong measure calling on the state’s elected representatives in Washington to investigate Bush and Cheney for misleading the nation into war, for authorizing torture, and for warrantless wiretapping. The message concludes: "If the investigation supports the charges, vote to impeach both Bush and Cheney as provided in the Constitution."

Massachusetts Democrats thus join California's huge Democratic Party, which passed a similar resolution less than a month ago at its annual convention, in what was widely perceived as a slap at Pelosi, who represents a district in San Francisco.

To date, 14 state Democratic Parties have now called for impeachment.

But that's only part of the story. Vermont's state senate has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for impeachment. Similar resolutions are being considered in the legislatures of 17 states. Over 80 cities, towns and counties have passed impeachment resolutions, as have at least that many town and county Democratic Party organizations, even in conservative areas such as Berkes and Chester County in Pennsylvania.

Many of these resolutions have been the work of the Progressive Democrats of America organization. Others have been promoted by ad hoc groups.

The impeachment resolutions, which have also been passed by Democratic Parties in so-called "red" states like Nevada and North Carolina, are a clear sign that impeachment is the will of the party's rank and file.

Polls have consistently shown that the broader public also wants the president and vice president impeached.

In October 2006, Newsweek published a scientific poll disclosing that 51 percent of Americans favored impeachment, half of them as a top priority.

That poll, of course, was taken before Democrats had gained control of the House and Senate, and also before Bush, ignoring the anti-war message of voters in November, decided to increase the number of US troops in his misbegotten and calamitous war in Iraq.

Another more recent poll, taken by a right-wing organization called InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion, found that 39 percent of respondents favored impeachment of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney together. The percentage for impeachment would almost certainly have been significantly higher if impeaching the two men had been offered as separate options in the poll.

Recent news developments are only making impeachment more popular with the public at large. The worsening Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and the President’s intransigence and obsession with continuing the slaughter of innocents and the sacrifice of Americans, has driven his popularity down to 28 percent, and the vice president’s to below 9 percent. The prosecutors firing scandal is taking down the attorney general, while exposing the outlines of one aspect of a six-year-long White House-orchestrated campaign to undermine the democratic election process using control of the justice system. And it is now becoming clear that the president's illegal National Security Agency spying program has been so outrageous an assault on Americans’ civil liberties that even then Attorney General John Ashcroft, himself a walking threat to the Bill of Rights, refused to sign on, despite his being pressed to do so from a hospital bed.

At this point, the Congressional leadership, including Pelosi and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), really need to start worrying that they may start looking ridiculous. Indeed, the Detroit City Council a few days ago passed a resolution calling on Congress to begin impeachment proceedings, and one of those voting for the resolution was Conyers’ own wife, herself a Detroit alderwoman!

Clearly the president has authorized an illegal spying campaign, and has already been declared to have committed a felony by a Detroit federal judge who tried the issue last summer. Clearly too, he has grossly abused his power by claiming to have “unitary executive power” as commander in chief in the war on terror, and that this power, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, gives him the authority to ignore and invalidate laws duly passed by the Congress. Finally, he clearly misled the Congress about the war, and clearly authorized the practice of torture against American captives.

Equally clearly, if the president is not impeached, Congress will be telegraphing that the next president, whomever that may be, can feel free to abuse the law and the Constitution in the same manner as the current president has been doing.

How can there not be impeachment proceedings!

None of Bush's and Cheney's grave crimes and abuses of power even require anything significant in the way of hearings. They could be submitted as bills of impeachment and voted on by the House Judiciary Committee and by the full Congress tomorrow, if there was the will to do so.

Instead, the Democratic leadership continues to dither, continues to permit the president to ignore subpoenas, continues to interfere with grassroots efforts to pass impeachment resolutions, and continues to ignore even the bill of impeachment against the vice president, House Resolution 333, submitted a month ago by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), even as it has now gained three co-sponsors.

The chasm is clearly widening between the leadership of the Democratic Party and the voters.

It may end up swallowing them up, come November 2008.

-----------------------------------

DAVE LINDORFF is the co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006, and due out in paperback in two weeks). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net and at www.counterpunch.org

Illinois House Bill to Impeach Bush HJR0125

suni2h — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:21:42 -0400

Hello. Just want to make sure everyone in Illinois is aware of HJR0125. HJR0125 is the Illinois General Assembly's Joint House Resolution to impeach President Bush.

We need to encourage Illinois state representatives to include Cheney, Rice and Rove in the resolution and pass the resolution as soon as possible.

The link to the bill is here:

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&SessionId=50&GA=94&DocTypeId=HJR&DocNum=0125&GAID=8&LegID=25794&SpecSess=&Session=

Religious Freedom

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 11:11:58 -0500

Treason and Impeachable Acts 2007

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Statute_for_Religious_Freedom

-"The imposition of anything on a human mind, which God made to be free, is hypocritical and wrong.
-"Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free", never coerced anyone to follow him, and the imposition of a religion by government officials is impious.
-The coercion of a person to make contributions -- especially monetary -- to a religion he doesn't support is tyrannical and creates favoritism among ministers.
-Government involvement in religious matters tends to end in the restraint of religion.
-Civil rights do not depend on religious beliefs, and what a person thinks is no business of the government's."

Faith Based Charity and funding to religious schools, bussing, is "religious cronyism" for votes, bribery for silence, and creates favored religious groups in our country.

Faith based charities failed in the first place. That's why government does it best. Churches, etc. can't retain professionals and experts on various problems of the homeless and disabled. To remove government services to the poor and needy hits them at their most vulnerable. It is just plain cruel.

Public funding to religious organizations silences poor and minority clergy to speak truth to power as they did during Martin Luther's "I have a dream" protests. You don't bite the hand that feeds you...public tax dollars.

Our funding and support of religious education drains it for public ones. The RWers want our public education removed for their theocracy govenment.

Americans by a large margin oppose public money going to any religious group because they don't trust them to do what it right with it (AU polls). Yet Congress fails to listen. They have not approved it yet allow the President to dip into the treasury illegally for it. It is yet another impeachable act by him.

Faith Based and religious funding by government violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights which many in our government swore to uphold. Did they commit perjury?

We might impeach our President but he is not alone in his unconstitutional acts regarding our treasury and religious funding. Congress fails to enforce their own duties of over sight and to do their own duties…giving them up to him.

We should add this to our list of impeachable acts by President Bush. “The buck stops here.” President Harry Truman.

It is time to make Bush and Cheney accountable for their crimes!

blueagle — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 23:23:02 -0500

Happy New Year Howard Dean!

Now that the Democratic Party has taken control of the House & Senate,
they need to carry out the wishes of the people who elected them to
office.
First: Investigate the many crimes committed by Bush and Cheney and hold
them accountable! Expose their false information about why they invaded
Iraq and set a time to re-deploy our troops to Afganistan where they
were suppose to be in the first place. Expose the lies of both Bush and
Cheney and have them impeached!!! This is what the people want you to
do! Take care of the country's business in an honest and practical way.
Cut out wasteful spending and corruption in Congress and the Executive
Branch. Do the Will of the American people and you will be doing the
right thing! Support Congressman John Conyers, Jr.
in his investigation of the crimes committed by Bush and Cheney.
Re-introduce H.R. Bil 635 now! Sincerely, Joseph Chimeno