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-- A Limited Impeachment Debate Might Still Happen
A Limited Impeachment Debate Might Still Happen
Here's Congressman Dennis Kucinich on the House Floor (via C-Span)
reading the Articles of Impeachment against Vice President Richard B. Cheney
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| Impeachment Is (Sort Of) On The Table The Nation Tue Nov 6, 4:25 PM ET The Nation -- The move by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich to open a House debate on the question of whether to impeach Vice President Cheney turned into a imbroglio for the Democratic leadership of the chamber Tuesday as mischievous Republicans joined dozens of Democrats in rejecting a move to table the resolution. Kucinich had been thwarted in his efforts to get the House Judiciary Committee to take up the proposal to hold the vice president to account for lying to Congress and the U.S. public in order to enter into a war in Iraq, and for trying to mislead again in order to start a war with Iran. So he used a privileged resolution to bring the impeachment question up before the full House. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, then moved to table Kucinich's resolution. "Impeachment is not on our agenda. We have some major priorities. We need to focus on those," said Hoyer, echoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stance that presidential accountability is "off the table." That should have been the end of it. But it wasn't. A combination of Democrats who sincerely favor impeachment of Cheney band Republicans who thought that an impeachment debate would embarrass Pelosi, Hoyer and other House Democratic leaders blocked the motion to table. Only 162 members -- 27 Republicans and 135 Democrats -- supported tabling the proposal. A total of 251 members -- 86 Democrats and 165 Republicans -- opposed it. What followed was wrangling between Kucinich and Hoyer on whether to refer the resolution to the Judiciary Committee. That set up more votes, as Democratic leaders continued to scramble to block Kucinich's impeachment proposal. As of late afternoon, the voting continued, with the prospect that a limited impeachment debate might occur on the House floor. That's what Kucinich wants. That's what Hoyer is trying to avoid. --------------------------------------------------------------------- John Nichols is the author of THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'" http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/2...tion/15249290_1 |
It will get tabled by Conyers in committee, just as the last one did this summer. But Kucinich (or any other rep for that matter) can continue to bring forward new privileged resolutions as often as he wants.
Kucinich's party whip, Steny Hoyer, tried to kill the plan (moved to table the resolution), which didn't work because the Republicans got cute and came over to defeat the table resolution in hopes to embarass the Dems. So then Hoyer set up a motion to refer the resolution to the Judiciary Committee where it passed and will die along with Kucinich's other impeachment bill.
So until I see the Democratic leadership take this seriously, I fail to see why anyone else would since it will continue to go nowhere.
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Kucinich's party whip, Steny Hoyer, tried to kill the plan (moved to table the resolution), which didn't work because the Republicans got cute and came over to defeat the table resolution in hopes to embarass the Dems. So then Hoyer set up a motion to refer the resolution to the Judiciary Committee where it passed and will die along with Kucinich's other impeachment bill. So until I see the Democratic leadership take this seriously, I fail to see why anyone else would since it will continue to go nowhere. |
Plenty of stuff to impeach him over, but not the political strength.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moveme...for_impeachment
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| Originally posted by Trancer-X I've heard that some of the Republicans are going to use this to distance themselves from Bush and Cheney. |
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| Originally posted by Trancer-X I've heard that some of the Republicans are going to use this to distance themselves from Bush and Cheney. |
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| Originally posted by Trancer-X I've heard that some of the Republicans are going to use this to distance themselves from Bush and Cheney. |
combine this farce with Donkey party f**k-up that was Mukasey's committee roll-on, this Congress is the most inept and disorganized piece of shit ever elected. EVER!!!!!!
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| Originally posted by Q5echo combine this farce with Donkey party f**k-up that was Mukasey's committee roll-on, this Congress is the most inept and disorganized piece of shit ever elected. EVER!!!!!! |
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 I wish I could disagree with you. I want to disagree with you. I can't though. This is the bi-product of that stupid fucking "conventional Beltway wisdom" crap that's suckered Democrats for the past 15 years now (if not longer). Having Reid and Pelosi in along with Hoyer as the whip have not helped the Democrats find their spines at all. The approval ratings you are seeing with Congress being in the cellar are primarily because of Democratic and Independent voters being pissed as hell for the Dem. majority not doing what they promised to do a year ago. |
Yeah, I have to agree that the Democratic Congress has failed to meet expectations. It's like they are afraid to lose a fight, so they never enter one. I would have liked to see the Senate make the Republicans actually filibuster the Webb Iraq resolution - the Dems had the votes, but probably not enough to overturn a filibuster. The Republicans were quietly against a resolution that would give US troops the rest between tours of duty that was formally standard operating procedure. So why not make the Republicans defend their anti-troop position for 12 hours, or 18 hours, or 3 days? Let America soak that in.
At least there has been some good news out of Congress on the domestic front periodically. From the Times:
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WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 � A majority of House Republicans joined Democrats this evening in escalating a confrontation with President Bush over federal spending as the House overrode Mr. Bush�s veto of a popular water projects measure. House Democrats also readied a $215 billion bill to pay for health, education, labor and veterans programs despite a veto threat. If the Senate follows suit, it would mark the first time Mr. Bush has had a veto overturned, setting the stage for the biggest clash between Congress and the White House over spending since Mr. Bush took office. |
Nora Ephron, who is usually a bit shrill:
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| Nora Ephron It's Hard to be a Democrat Posted November 5, 2007 | 09:58 AM (EST) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It's hard to be a Democrat, don't you think? There's no alternative, of course, but it's hard. Someone asked me the other day to write something about why I was a Democrat, and I had no trouble making a list of 10 reasons. Of course, five of those reasons were the Supreme Court, and the other five were more or less historical -- reasons like FDR, which is not meant to mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt exactly but some fantasy blob of Democratic values that are a distant racial memory. But it's hard. It's especially hard to remember that the real enemies are the Republicans, when the Democrats tend to break your heart and the Republicans are just the boys you'd never go out with anyway. It's hard when you watch a debate and decide that in the end you're probably going to throw your vote away in the primary and vote for someone who doesn't have a chance, like Dennis Kucinich. I mean, look at them, look at the front runners: Hillary Clinton, who can't help being Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama, who was a disappointment from the beginning and whose new-found attack mode is as dispiriting as his low energy level used to be; John Edwards, whom I am afraid I will never be able to think of again (after this week's Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal) as anything but a desperate furry little woodland animal. And then there are the Democrats in the Congress. What a bunch of losers, hiding behind the fact that it takes 60 votes to shut down debate and 67 to override a presidential veto. So what? So pass a law and make Bush veto it. Make him veto something every single day. Drive the guy crazy. What have you got to lose? And meanwhile what have you done? You've voted for the surge, you've voted to authorize a war against Iran, and you're about to vote in favor of an attorney general-designate who refuses to call waterboarding torture. Which brings me, I'm afraid, to Chuck Schumer. I can't honestly say that Chuck Schumer broke my heart last week, because he's never really had my heart. He's Captain Bromide. And I can't even look at him without being reminded of an old radio-and-television show called Quiz Kids, which featured a boy genius named Joel Kupperman who was always waving his hand wildly whenever a question was asked and shouting, "I know! I know!" In addition, and because he happens to be my Senator, I have watched Schumer transform himself: he used to be a schlepper (as they say in Schumer's former congressional district) and now he's groomed to a fare-thee-well. I salute any man who takes charge of a thinning hairline with so much product, but Schumer's makeover always seemed to me a worrisome sign, and not merely a symptom of my own shallowness: it seemed to me to show that he had left Brooklyn and New York, in some fundamental way, for the Beltway -- which is not meant to mean the Beltway exactly but instead a nonstop series of cable and network television appearances that add up to very little in the way of action and a great deal in the way of bluster. Nonetheless, when I read on Friday that Schumer had decided to support Michael Mukasey for attorney general, thus making Mukasey's confirmation by the Senate inevitable, my heart sank. I read his justification of his vote. He said that Mukasey was the best we could hope for from this administration. He said the Justice Department needed to be rebuilt. He said that no nominee for attorney general was ever going to come out against waterboarding, and that Mukasey at least promised to follow the law if (somehow) the Senate passed an anti-waterboarding law (that survived a Bush veto). It's probably unfair to blame Schumer entirely for this; after all, Dianne Feinstein made the same decision. And more than half the Democrats in the Senate are apparently prepared to vote for Mukasey. But here's what they should do instead: Reject Mukasey. Make Bush send up another nominee. Reject that nominee if he won't take a position on waterboarding. And just keep on doing it. Because it's the right thing to do. Because waterboarding is torture. Because we are torturing people and it has to stop, and it will never stop unless the Democrats make it stop. And forget about the Justice Department. No one will fix the Justice Department until there's a new president. And he or she has got to be a Democrat. That goes without saying. Because after all, there's the Supreme Court. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo dude get a clue. the Repubs want this like Opus said, to put the Donk's money where their f**kin mouths are. the Dems DO NOT want to go on record to defend what they've said in the not-so-distant past only to have what they've said in the recent past embarass the f**k out of them. this is rich. soooooo rich vote Kucinch |
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| Originally posted by LazFX but the past few years has been a total fuck up across the fucking board and you Americans know it! |
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| Originally posted by Trancer-X You're not an American? |
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