The Bush impeachment wagon has officially rolled out of the station. Three states: Illinois, California and Vermont, have or are considering joint resolutions of the respective state houses that would trigger a little known rule of the House of Representatives in Washington, calling for hearings on the impeachment of the president of the United States. From Alternet:
Forget bird flu, impeachment is spreading across the nation, state by state.
On Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Dave Zuckerman (Prog.-VT) dropped the third of three nearly unreported bombshells on the Bush administration. Zuckerman, along with 12 fellow lawmakers, introduced a formal resolution for the Vermont state legislature to call on the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach President George W. Bush. With this resolution, Vermont joined the California and Illinois state legislatures, already embroiled in impeachment debates of their own.
For those who still believe impeachment's just a pipe dream, there are several key developments to consider beyond this burgeoning state movement. In addition to the hawkish Zbigniew Brzezinski's op-ed in Tuesday's International Herald Tribune warning that an attack on Iran could merit impeachment, Salon's Michelle Goldberg and my colleague Onnesha Roychoudhuri both noted last month that the "i-word" had gone public.
"[T]he distant rumbling is growing louder by the day, creating a resonant echo that is rapidly taking root in public discourse. 'Impeach Him,' reads the cover of this month's Harper's Magazine. And in a public forum in New York City last week, journalists, lawyers and political figures came together to discuss the case against our president."
While the main impediment continues to be a sycophantic Republican majority, polls show that more Americans favor impeachment hearings than currently approve of the job Bush is doing (33 to 32 percent). In addition, as Bob Geiger notes, Bush's state-by-state popularity is lower than even his anemic nationwide figures suggest, with a paltry four states remaining red two years into his second term. In other words, the population has the stomach for it even if the representatives don't.
The legal basis for these unprecedented state-level actions was discovered when, according to Steven Leser, Illinois Rep. Karen A. Yarbrough "stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the U.S. House of Representatives." The rule was written in a book formerly known as Jefferson's Manual, which, according to C-SPAN, "is a book of rules of procedure and parliamentary philosophy … written by Thomas Jefferson in 1801 … [used by the House] as a supplement to its standing rules." Section LIII, sec. 603 states, "There are various methods of setting an impeachment in motion … [one of them is] by charges transmitted from the legislature of a State …"
Each of the three resolutions mentions Iraq lies, torture and illegal spying, with slight variations in tone and specifics. Assemblyman Paul Koretz's California resolution (which includes Dick Cheney) and the Illinois resolution both include the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, while Vermont's focuses almost exclusively on Bush's most salient transgression, his illegal spying on Americans. The spying charge leads the other two resolutions' list of charges as well.
The question for Democrats, who control the legislature in California, for instance, is whether pushing for impeachment is worth the potential loss of "bi-partisan cooperation" on other matters, as the representative floating that state's joint resolution pointed out on Randi Rhodes' show yesterday. The answer, as Randi said, is of course it's worth it. And by the way, Republicans wouldn't even ask whether it was, they would have moved for impeachment long ago if Bush were a Dmeocrat... The point is that since the Republican leadership in Congress, which is not only supine and solicitous of the president, but also complicit in much of what he has done, including the illegal wiretapping of Americans, will clearly never act to constrain this White House, the states of our union must do it for them.
That's Jefferson's genius, and if there was ever a time to implement it, that time is now, before Bush launches an illegal, unprovoked war against Iran.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
