CALL TO MARCH ACTION ON IMPEACHMENT!!
PLEASE READ AND SUPPORT!!
"National Call for Impeachment Bills."
Focus on the week of March 16 - 22 to flood
House members with our support for EITHER
bills on INVESTIGATIONS for impeachment OR
ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT.
Nixon, Cheney, and Le Deluge
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/31481
By David Swanson
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:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/floodwhitepaper.pdf
A partial list of the bills introduced against Nixon:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/floodappendices.pdf
Arguments in favor of this approach:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/floodwhy.pdf
And a cover letter:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/floodcoverletter.pdf
The group reported on their congressional visits: "The Nixon Flooding
Plan was met with high interest from all of our 32 Congressional
contacts as a practical strategy for helping them to live up to that
oath of office. Using our networking knowledge of and confidence in the
millions of Americans passionate about impeachment, we promised those
who take up the Nixon plan national recognition and support and offered
sample investigation/impeachment bills for their convenience in drafting
such a bill. One constant heard from House members and/or their key
staffers was their message: 'We need to hear from our constituents'
about trying that multiple-bill approach.
"So the main effort we're launching is a drive in the national
impeachment movement for a "National Call for Impeachment Bills." We'll
focus on the week of March 16 - 22 to flood House members with our
support for either bills on investigations for impeachment or articles
of impeachment.
"One message House members need to hear is that participants in that
Nixon plan were re-elected in 1974 (five are still in the House). Only
two participants were not re-elected, but not because of hoppering an
impeachment bill against Nixon. Republican Paul McCloskey lost to a
Democrat; and Bill Roy ran for Senate. Not only did the Democrats
control the House in 1973-75 (242-192-1)), but they added nearly 50 more
members (291-144) three months after Nixon resigned."
Congressman Kucinich has drafted over 50 articles of impeachment against
Bush, and he should be encouraged to introduce those soon. But he and
every member of Congress should be encouraged to introduce their own
favorite resolution with regard to Cheney, even if it's simply a
proposal to hold impeachment hearings.
The week of March 16-22 is a week when Congress Members are home in the
districts. It's also the five-year point in the occupation of Iraq. A
number of impeachment groups led by Code Pink have already designated
the 18th a day for impeachment events. Why not plan now to pay a visit
to your congress member's local office that week? More on what's
happening that week can be found at http://resistinmarch.org
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