Reply #116: I am talking about citizen lobbyists lobbying their representatives. . [View All]

[pat_k]

. . .to stand up for Impeachment/Censure (and the earlier related efforts to lobby members of the Senate to stand up on January 6th and to vote against cloture on the Alito nomination).

When you are in the office (or on the phone) talking to your Senator or Rep (or a member of their staff) lobbying them to add their voice to the call for Censure/Impeachment it is most certainly a distraction to say "Hey, btw, what are you doing about healthcare?" or "Gee, we sure liked what you did on the bankruptcy bill."

In my replies to this thread, this has been the consistent theme.

Post #27 . . .Our job is to challenge their rationalizations, not excuse them. . . . Their denial is understandable. The truth is hard to face. They are just people. But they are people who are charged with supporting and defending the Constitution. They are subject to OUR advice and consent. If we don't challenge their rationalizations and do whatever we can to help them confront the hard truths head on, we are abdicating OUR responsibility.

Post #29 . . .We need to stop excusing their dereliction of duty and challenge the rationalizations that are stopping them from doing their duty. . .

Post #30 . . .I am recruiting Citizen lobbyists to challenge the rationalizations that their Senators and Representatives invoke to justify their failure to co-sponsor Censure (or in the House, Conyers' resolution) and call for Impeachment

Post #33 . . .Some of us are turning complaint into action. Some of us are calling and asking questions to find out what is stopping the members of Congress who represent us from acting, and challenging the rationalizations they invoke. Some of us are sitting down with staffers and challenging their rationalizations in one-on-one dialogs. Some are seeking to meet and speak directly to members. . .

Post #53 The Senators who stood against Alito were great and most of them were pushed there by the pressure of ordinary citizens. They were inundated. It was great to see (I was down there, walking the halls of the Senate Hart Bldg, delivering letters and talking to any Judicial LA I could get my hands on.). . . I will keep pushing my fellow citizens and our leaders to challenge the boundaries of "politics as usual."

Post #92 . . .I do what I can to motivate my fellow citizens to challenge them to make the right choice.

Post #98 Challenge more members to fulfill their oath and speak out and support those, like Feingold and Conyers who have led the way. . .

Encouraging citizens to go to their representatives in Congress and challenge those representatives to fight for the integrity of the nation helps to restore We the People to our rightful role in shaping our government. When we engage more Americans in the fight to assert our collective sovereignty and force out those who are overruling our will, we are building a foundation from which we can more effectively fight for our common interests.

The grim reality is that as long as we permit the fascists to exercise power, they will abuse it in their pursuit of ever more power. The Bush syndicate will never submit to legitimate authority unless forced to.

There are countless problems we must solve as a nation. But we cannot make progress as long as our constitution and our laws carry no weight with the occupants of the executive branch. That is the hard truth.

I'm all for delving into specific problems and figuring out ways to advance the interests of the American people, but until we have legitimate government and have determined the full extent of the damage they done, we will be unable to implement and test the solutions (or what we do implement will just be torched with a signing statement). If we try to implement solutions before we have cleaned house, we are spinning our wheels.

I want our representatives to propose solutions, but I also want them to acknowledge that they cannot move forward on those solutions until we have taken the power of the American Presidency from Bush and Cheney and put it in legitimate hands, whether those hands be Hastert's now or Pelosi's next year.

This does not minimize the importance of protecting the environment, Roe, or dealing with any other challenge we face as a nation. Certainly, if we render the planet uninhabitable, it won't much matter whether America was a dictatorship or a constitutional democracy. But, our first job is to restore legitimate authority. Americans can only have a role in creating rational global and domestic policy if we have a functioning constitutional democracy capable of enacting and enforcing our collective will. Impeachment is the first step on the road.

As I said in my first post to this thread, ". . . the road out of the quagmire in Iraq must go through Impeachment."