Dave Lindorff: Friday's House Judiciary Hearing on Impeachment: A Victory and a Challenge

[Demeter]

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/lindorff/123

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation's democracy by two aspiring tyrants in the White House...

At the same time, while the hearing was strictly limited to the most superficial airing of Bush Administration crimes and misdemeanors, the fact that the session -- technically an argument in defense of 26 articles of impeachment filed in the House over the past several months by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) -- was nonetheless a major victory for the impeachment movement. It happened because earlier in the month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has sworn since taking control of the House in November 2006, that impeachment would be "off the table" during the 110th Congress, called a hasty meeting with Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Conyers, and Rep. Kucinich, and called for such a limited hearing....It was no coincidence that shortly before Pelosi's backdown, peace activist and Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan announced that her campaign had collected well over the 10,000 signatures necessary to qualify for listing on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress against Pelosi in the Speaker's home district in San Francisco. Sheehan has been an outspoken advocate of impeaching both Bush and Cheney. "Pelosi is trying to throw a bone to her constituents by allowing a hearing on impeachment," said Sheehan, who came to Washington, DC to attend. "It's just like her finally stating publicly that Bush's presidency is a failure -- something it has taken her two years to come to, but which we've been saying for years."

So determined were Pelosi and Conyers to limit the scope and intensity of the hearing that they acceded to a call for Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to adhere to Thomas Jefferson's Rules of the House, which prohibit any derogatory comments about the President, which was interpreted by Chairman Conyers as meaning no one, including witnesses or members of the committee, could suggest that Bush had lied or deceived anyone. Since a number of Rep. Kucinich's proposed articles of impeachment specifically charge the president with lying to Congress and the American People, this made for some comic moments, with witness Bruce Fein, a former assistant attorney general under former President Ronald Reagan, to say he would reference his listing of crimes to the "resident" of the White House. In the end, the rule imposing a gag on calling the president a criminal fell by the wayside, with witness Vincent Bugliosi. A former Los Angeles deputy district attorney, accusing Bush of being guilty of the murder of over 4,000 American soldiers and of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians because he had "lied" the country into an illegal and unnecessary war, and with committee member Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) suggesting that the president may have committed treason in invading Iraq, and that he appeared to be preparing to do it again with an unprovoked invasion of Iran....

It was clear that this was to be a tightly controlled and strictly limited hearing.

It was also clear that it was intended to go nowhere...In the end, the hearing petered out, taking no action of any kind -- exactly the result that Pelosi, Hoyer and Conyers cynically intended. Now it is up to the public and the impeachment movement to call their bluff and take impeachment to the next level. Noting that even Rep. Conyers ended the hearing by saying, "We are not done yet, and we do not intend to go away until we achieve the accountability that Congress is entitled to and that the American people deserve," Rep. Kucinich and six other co-sponsors of his articles of impeachment (Robert Wexler, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Maurice Hinchey, Sheila Jackson-Lee, and Hank Johnson) are calling on all Americans to contact their representatives (202/224-3121) and urge them to join in co-sponsoring those articles and in calling for a formal impeachment hearing. They are also calling on everyone to contact their local and national media, nearly all of whom have blacked out news of impeachment. Incredibly, The New York Times, for example, has not even reported on Friday's hearing, even as a news "brief." Those news organizations, such as The Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer, that did report on the hearings did so only in short, inside articles. Though the hearing was aired in full on C-SPAN (and is still available for download), many Americans don't even know it happened...That Pelosi buckled and permitted a hearing on impeachable crimes by the Bush/Cheney administration is a major victory for the impeachment movement, but it must not be the end of the line. Impeachment activists need to now redouble their efforts to make Congress do its Constitutional duty, and initiate a formal impeachment proceeding. As former Republican representative Bob Barr, now the Libertarian candidate for president, told Friday's hearing, "We had a nuclear clock during the Cold War. In the '90s, we had a debt clock. Now we have a Constitution Clock."

That clock is getting close to midnight, and it is ticking.



DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

[barbtries]

1. this is good

i will make a call today. will contact them again. it's discouraging but as long as i don't give up i'll have that much clear on my conscience.