Posted on 05/22/2007 12:34:52 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Democratic Party leaders have taken no steps to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, so a group of political activists is bringing the urgency of impeachment to the people.
National and local voices for impeachment led a town hall meeting Monday evening at the Memorial Union.
Debra Sweet, a Madison native and national director of World Can't Wait, a New York-based group promoting impeachment, said the country needs to break out of politics as usual.
"Impeachment is not exactly politics as usual. Many, many people across this country feel utterly locked out about how to change anything right now in terms of the political process," she told about 250 people in Great Hall.
Not only did Bush get the country into an illegitimate and illegal war in Iraq, she said, but he violated FISA -- the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- which requires a warrant be issued before surveillance is conducted.
"Everyone in Congress knows that Bush openly violated the FISA law, he told us that he violated it. These are impeachable offenses. There is no question about that. The political will for impeachment can only come from one place, the people," Sweet said.
The articles of impeachment, she said, can be written overnight on a cocktail napkin.
"What's lacking is the political will," she said, noting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the extraordinary step six months ago of saying that impeachment is off the table.
John Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times and author of the book, "The Genius of Impeachment," traveled around Vermont talking about impeachment with the country's most famous war protester, Cindy Sheehan. There are now 41 towns in Vermont that voted to impeach the president.
In April, Vermont state senators voted to call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, saying their actions have raised "serious questions of constitutionality." The nonbinding resolution is believed to be the first in the country.
Nichols said he is disappointed that Wisconsin hasn't followed suit.
"Why hasn't Madison, Wisconsin, the radical hotbed of America, blah, blah, blah voted to impeach the president and vice president of the United States?" he asked, encouraging the audience to pressure the Madison City Council to do just that.
"Let's get this on the City Council's agenda and let's get it done," he said.
Nichols said he worries about the president and vice president leading the country into a war with Iran, "a war that can only end in nuclear holocaust."
While the Congress of the United States debates benchmarks and timelines, Nichols gave his own timelines:
"Every 10 minutes an Iraqi dies in this war. Every 10 hours an American dies in this war. Every 10 days $2 billion are taken out of the U.S. Treasury and poured into the pockets of Halliburton and the other war criminals of this conflict. That is the timeline we should be discussing," he said, drawing a standing ovation.
"The failure to impeach damns this country to a darker future," Nichols said.
Monday, Democracy for America, a pressure group within the Democratic Party, launched www.impeachgonzales.org, a national Web site collecting petitions to pressure Congress to impeach Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In the first hour that it was up, more than 20,000 people signed the petition.
Organizers believe that by the end of the week they will have more than a million signatures and they are ready to go to Congress and force the issue, Nichols said.
"This is no longer the fringe. This is the core of the Democratic Party... The fact is, impeachment is coming to the mainstream and it is coming just in time," he said.
David Swanson, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition pushing for impeachment, and a part-time consultant for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, showed up to the forum wearing a T-shirt that said "Impeach Bush & Cheney."
A successful movement requires spreading the word in fun and creative ways "that make the dull-sounding work of restoring our Constitution" enjoyable and productive, Swanson said.
"Based on the few polls that we have, we know that those of us who want impeachment are a majority or very close to it," he said. "That should give us all the confidence we need to make impeachment happen."
A January Zogby poll commissioned by Swanson's group showed that Americans, by a margin of 52 to 43 percent, want Congress to consider impeaching Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval.
But it's not enough to be a majority -- it also has to feel like a majority, he said. One of the ways to do that is to wear a T-shirt like Swanson's everywhere you go, he said, adding that the shirts are available on the Web site www.impeach07.org.
"I've been wearing the shirts for two years and I can count on one hand the negative comments I've had," he said, noting that some of those encounters led to productive conversations. On the other hand, he has had thousands of positive comments, compliments and shows of support.
"If we push hard enough we can make impeachment happen," Swanson said.
According to costofwar.com, the people of Wisconsin have spent $6.8 billion on the occupation of Iraq, he said. Instead, the state could have provided 330,744 students with four-year scholarships to public universities, according to the Web site.
When Swanson asked if there were any college students in the room, four hands went up. "We need to get college students in this room," he said.
Looking into the crowd, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed Garvey, the fourth of the evening's speakers, said he saw people who believe they can bring about change.
"I am sick and tired of people telling me that there are more important issues than the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. What the hell are they?" he said.
Buzz Davis of the Wisconsin Impeachment/Bring Our Troops Home Coalition, who organized the forum, said his group has collected more than 5,000 names on impeachment petitions for Bush, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for "high crimes and misdemeanors."
The event will be broadcast at 7 p.m. Thursday on WYOU/Cable channel 4.
Here’s the World Can’t Wait contact page:
What are they going to do in 2009 when Bush/Cheney/Rove aren’t around to focus their misguided angst toward?
For 8 years it’s been “Get Bush and Co”, well when ‘Bush and Co’ are out, what exactly will their jihad cry be?
If they like citing the bill for the war so much, I suggest they also start talking about the cost of legalizing the illegal aliens, too.
As far as I can tell the FISA act actually allows the president to conduct surveillance in certain cases WITHOUT warrants.
Make a wish, put it on your T shirt, and it will come true. Must be that Law of Attraction teaching.
Fringe, by its very definition, is lacking in substance, largely irrelevant but decorative and interesting.
So can we just consider the kooks, both right and left, as entertainment, while the realists among us look for serious solutions to complicated problems?
And can we also admit that there will always be problems? If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
I think my Grandma said that.
Make a wish, put it on your T shirt, and it will come true. Must be that Law of Attraction teaching.
Grass roots, indeed! All the roots lead to George (spit!) Soros.
Well at least now we know they were drunk and not complete imbeciles; or is that redundant for a Dem?
The only valid grounds are possibly his border policies, but they totally agree with him on this subject. If the grounds for impeachment are the war in Iraq, they will blow their own feet off. In the long run, Watergate didn’t help the Dems, and trying to impeach Clinton didn’t help the Repubs.
What counts is policy and being responsive to popular will within the framework of the Constitution and national security and economic health, and BOTH parties just haven’t gotten it. The Dems are the party of personal attacks and Bolshevik politics, and the Republicans are the party with a great philosophy which they haven’t got the courage to support. They almost deserve each other.
I think we should encourage this.
1. It will anger most people if they try to impeach the President.
2. It will reveal the Democrats as the moonbats they are.
3. The President will be gone in 18 months. He can spin out the trial to take up a good half of that time. With luck, he can have the Senate trial during the Democrat’s primary season. That will trap their leading candidates between the nutroots and the sane majority.
4. The more time Democrats spend conducting an impeachment the less time they will have for legislating. Whenever the Democrats hold Congress *anything* that reduces their time to write new laws is a feature, not a bug.
Drug dens have cocktail napkins?
It's not a basis for impeachment if it's passed by the House and Senate, nor is it a basis for impeachment for Bush to advocate for it.
It's all wrong of course (at least I think so), but nothing that will stand up in an impeachment trial.
“The President will be gone in 18 months. He can spin out the trial to take up a good half of that time.”
They perhaps want to turn the “trial” into a showcase for political grist, but it won’t work. It will backfire on them. I don’t think the Dems are that politically naive.
With George W. Bushs’ support of Amnesty, he may find a lot of conservatives won’t be running to defend him.
“The articles of impeachment, she said, can be written overnight on a cocktail napkin.”
About the same size as a document large enough to contain all she knows about anything.
Impeach Hitlery!
Ssshhhh!
Let the stupid jerks talk and plot all they want.
They don’t understand that impeachment is a constitutionally-driven legislative process. The impeachment fanatics don’t understand that THEY don’t get make stuff (or rules) up once it comes into the House. There are established rules and procedures for how things are done. Everything takes time and votes. A lot of votes.
The House Democrats can’t even come up with the votes needed to force a time line be inserted into an Iraq supplemental bill and make it stick. How are they going to come up with the 2/3rds majority needed to pass a bill of impeachment? And if they did, how are the Senate Democrats going to convict with a 50 vote “majority?”
So let the flamers like Kucinich, and Conners, and Waters, etc. rant and rail all they want to. Let them file their articles with the Clerk of the House. Let them keep the left wing/liberal fringe spun up so high that they waste all their time on trying to make the impossible possible. (Instead of going out and causing real trouble.)
This issue is a dead letter and the Democratic leadership knows it. IMO, the only reason that they (the Democratic leadership) lets it go on is because: 1) it worries the Republicans (and that can’t be all bad), and 2) it keeps the lunatics in their own party diverted and out of the way.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.