Impeachment: It Still Matters

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/17/9672/

Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, again introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush.

They were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where no action is likely to be taken.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., strongly supported the impeachment of President Bush three years ago.

In an interview with Harpers magazine in 2005, Conyers was asked why impeachment was important.

“To take away the excuse that we didn’t know,” Conyers said at the time. “So that two or four or 10 years from now, if somebody should ask, ‘Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?’ when the Bush administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that ’somehow it escaped our notice’ that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.”

In 2005, when the Republican Party was crowing about a permanent shift in American politics that meant conservatives would control government for decades to come, Conyers was in the minority.

He couldn’t get any one to pay attention to the offenses committed by the Bush administration.

But then came the Downing Street Memos, which revealed how the Iraq war was sold under false pretenses. And then came Hurricane Katrina, and the nation watched how the Bush administration left New Orleans to die. And the weight of the accumulated lies by the administration grew heavier and heavier.

Taken together, all this was how the Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Yet one of the first acts of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., when she became Speaker of the House, was to declare that impeachment “was off the table.”

Impeachment is the most important issue at this time. Everything else, the war, the economy, healthcare, none of it can be resolved if we don't insist on honesty and integrity at the highest levels of government.

Right now, Congress is snubbing its nose at the American people, ignoring the real cause of the disunity that is bringing our nation to a halt. That cause is distrust, and distrust is alleviated (in my experience) only by completely airing the facts. As long as we hide behind a veneer of "niceness" and refuse to say out loud that our emperor has no clothes, we will be unable to approach our other problems.

Impeachment is necessary. We need to begin now.