By David Lindorff, 5/22/07
The
divide between Democratic leaders contemplating their re-election
prospects in 2008 and rank-and-file Democrats is becoming a chasm–one
so wide that Congressional Democrats may soon find it hard to straddle
it.
The issue is impeachment.
So far, Democrats in Congress and at the top of the party hierarchy,
out of touch with public sentiment and worried that impeachment could
hurt them with “independents”–whom they mistakenly consider to stand
somehow “in between” Democrats and Republicans–have been following
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s vow that for the 110th Congress,
“impeachment is off the table.” They’ve been doing more than that: they
have been actively working to tamp down, and even to crush, impeachment
campaigns in the states. For example, in the state of Washington, an
effort to get the state to pass a joint legislative resolution which
would have compelled the Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings
was derailed after the Democratic leadership dispatched two of the
state’s leading federal elected officials, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep.
Jay Inslee, to press legislative leaders to block a floor vote. Similar
pressure doomed efforts that might have passed in the legislatures of
New Mexico and Vermont (The Vermont Senate did pass the resolution).
Meanwhile, down at the state and local level, Democratic Party
committee after Democratic Party committee is voting out resolutions
calling for impeachment. The latest Democratic Party organization to
call for impeachment of both Bush and Cheney is the Massachusetts
Democratic Party, which at its state convention on Saturday, May 19,
voted out a strong measure calling on the state’s elected
representatives in Washington to investigate Bush and Cheney for
misleading the nation into war, for authorizing torture, and for
warrantless wiretapping. The message concludes: “If the investigation
supports the charges, vote to impeach both Bush and Cheney as provided
in the Constitution.”
Massachusetts Democrats thus join California’s huge Democratic Party,
which passed a similar resolution less than a month ago at its annual
convention, in what was widely perceived as a slap at Pelosi, who
represents a district in San Francisco.
To date, 14 state Democratic Parties have now called for impeachment.
But that’s only part of the story. Vermont’s state senate has
overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for impeachment. Similar
resolutions are being considered in the legislatures of 17 states. Over
80 cities, towns and counties have passed impeachment resolutions, as
have at least that many town and county Democratic Party organizations,
even in conservative areas such as Berkes and Chester County in
Pennsylvania.
Many of these resolutions have been the work of the Progressive Democrats of America organization. Others have been promoted
by ad hoc groups.
The impeachment resolutions, which have also been passed by Democratic Parties in so-called “red” states like Nevada and
North Carolina, are a clear sign that impeachment is the will of the party’s rank and file.
Polls have consistently shown that the broader public also wants the president and vice president impeached.
In October 2006, Newsweek published a scientific poll disclosing that 51 percent of Americans favored impeachment,
half of them as a top priority.
That poll, of course, was taken before Democrats had gained control of
the House and Senate, and also before Bush, ignoring the anti-war
message of voters in November, decided to increase the number of US
troops in his misbegotten and calamitous war in Iraq.
Another more recent poll, taken by a right-wing organization called InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion, found that 39 percent
of respondents favored impeachment of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney together.
The percentage for impeachment would almost certainly have been
significantly higher if impeaching the two men had been offered as
separate options in the poll.
Recent news developments are only making impeachment more popular with
the public at large. The worsening Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and
the President’s intransigence and obsession with continuing the
slaughter of innocents and the sacrifice of Americans, has driven his
popularity down to 28 percent, and the vice president’s to below 9
percent. The prosecutors firing scandal is taking down the attorney
general, while exposing the outlines of one aspect of a six-year-long
White House-orchestrated campaign to undermine the democratic election
process using control of the justice system. And it is now becoming
clear that the president’s illegal National Security Agency spying
program has been so outrageous an assault on Americans” civil liberties
that even then Attorney General John Ashcroft, himself a walking threat
to the Bill of Rights, refused to sign on, despite his being pressed to
do so from a hospital bed.
At this point, the Congressional leadership, including Pelosi and Rep.
John Conyers (D-MI), really need to start worrying that they may start
looking ridiculous. Indeed, the Detroit City Council a few days ago
passed a resolution calling on Congress to begin impeachment
proceedings, and one of those voting for the resolution was Conyers”
own wife, herself a Detroit alderwoman!
Clearly the president has authorized an illegal spying campaign, and
has already been declared to have committed a felony by a Detroit
federal judge who tried the issue last summer. Clearly too, he has
grossly abused his power by claiming to have “unitary executive power”
as commander in chief in the war on terror, and that this power,
nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, gives him the authority to
ignore and invalidate laws duly passed by the Congress. Finally, he
clearly misled the Congress about the war, and clearly authorized the
practice of torture against American captives.
Equally clearly, if the president is not
impeached, Congress will be telegraphing that the next president,
whomever that may be, can feel free to abuse the law and the
Constitution in the same manner as the current president has been
doing.
How can there not be impeachment proceedings!
None of Bush’s and Cheney’s grave crimes and abuses of power even
require anything significant in the way of hearings. They could be
submitted as bills of impeachment and voted on by the House Judiciary
Committee and by the full Congress tomorrow, if there was the will to
do so.
Instead, the Democratic leadership continues to dither, continues to
permit the president to ignore subpoenas, continues to interfere with
grassroots efforts to pass impeachment resolutions, and continues to
ignore even the bill of impeachment against the vice president, House
Resolution 333, submitted a month ago by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH),
even as it has now gained three co-sponsors.
The chasm is clearly widening between the leadership of the Democratic Party and the voters.
It may end up swallowing them up, come November 2008.