March 3, 2008 at 12:59:05 Headlined on 3/3/08: by David Swanson Page 1 of 1 page(s) | |    |
Congressman Dennis Kucinich's resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney now has more cosponsors signed onto it than any resolution to impeach President Richard Nixon ever had. But separate resolutions to impeach Nixon, some with a handful of cosponsors, many with no cosponsors at all, were filed by the dozens. Today, Kucinich's resolution stands alone.
"Back in 1973," Barbara Ellis wrote in a recent paper that has inspired a new strategy among advocates of impeachment, "nearly 90 Democratic House members banded together to hopper separate bills to impeach Nixon. Two-thirds of them were to investigate whether Nixon's deeds rose to the level of Constitutional standards for impeachment; the other third were plain-vanilla articles of impeachment. In October alone, a flood of 40 bills were filed in that Democratic-controlled House."
Today there are 50 or 60 members of Congress who openly or secretly support impeachment or impeachment hearings for Cheney. There are 26 who have signed onto actual articles of impeachment (Kucinich's resolution), several others who have signed onto a letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers urging impeachment hearings, several others who have made public comments suggesting they favor the hearings, and several more who signed on during the last Congress to Conyers' resolution to create a "preliminary impeachment investigation." Conyers has not reintroduced that bill.
A group of citizen activists from around the country has been meeting with members of Congress and their staffers to argue a case for recreating what they are calling the Nixon flooding plan. If, they argue, just the 30 or 40 members who are currently pushing for Cheney's impeachment were to file their own resolutions, the impact would be far greater than simply adding more names to Kucinich's bill or to a Dear Colleague letter. All that is needed, in other words, to move impeachment forward in the House might be for those who already claim to support it to put their printers where their mouths are and crank out a couple of dozen new bills.
In the Nixonian example, many of the bills introduced were very short and simple, and many were nearly identical to each other. Others picked out a few favorites from the list of available abuses by that president. In the case of Dick Cheney (or George Bush, for that matter), Congress Members could turn to the recent example of Congressman Jay Inslee's short and simple resolution to open an impeachment hearing on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. (Thirty-two members got behind that bill, and surely more would have signed on had Gonzales not resigned. Now, Gonzales' replacement is repeating his crimes and abuses of power, but impeaching Mukasey would just highlight the fact that Bush and Cheney are giving the orders and that the Senate approved a clone of Gonzales as his replacement.) Beyond Gonzales-style resolutions that simply create hearings, pro-Constitution congress members could pick from a select menu of those abuses in which (unlike most of the Bush-Cheney abuses) Congress has not been complicit. These include rewriting laws with signing statements and proceeding to violate numerous statutes, refusals to turn over information, misleading Congress, refusals to comply with subpoenas, ordering former staffers not to comply with subpoenas, refusals to enforce contempt citations, commuting the sentence of a former top staffer who obstructed an investigation that involved Cheney and Bush, exposure of an undercover agent as punishment for a whistleblower, running a secret energy task force in violation of open-government laws, profiting through no-bid contracts to a war profiteer, election fraud, and the criminally negligent response to Hurricane Katrina.
Barbara Ellis, the author of the paper excerpted above, is an impeachment activist in Oregon and a member of a group called the National Coalition of We the People. Three members of this group, Michael Greenman from Ohio, Marcia Meyers from Oregon, and Carl McCargo from Massachusetts, traveled to Washington, D.C., last week and met with 32 congressional offices, in some cases with members and in others with staff. They intentionally included among those they spoke with some of the leaders of the original Nixon Flooding Plan who are still in Congress: Pete Stark (CA-8), John Conyers (MI-1), William Lacy Clay (MO-1), David Obey (WI-7), and Charles Rangel (NY-19).
They brought along a packet of information that included Ellis's paper:
A partial list of the bills introduced against Nixon:
Arguments in favor of this approach:
http://www.davidswanson.org
DAVID SWANSON is a co-founder of After Downing Street, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson obtained a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1997.
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