Here comes the cavalry:
The Democratic leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is promising that her party has no plans to pursue impeachment of President Bush if it wins a majority in next month's elections. But she intends to allow the House Judiciary Committee to be headed by a lawmaker who has been preparing the grounds for impeachment for two years.A lot of the above report was put together before the Dems got hold of the Senate, of course. From the comments, latest news and a plan of action to get things moving:
John Conyers, a Democrat of Michigan, is now in line to become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has the authority to begin hearings and an investigation into whether the planning and selling of the Iraq war was a constitutional crime...
Members of Mr. Conyers's staff refused a request to answer questions on the record yesterday. A senior aide to Mr. Conyers was careful to say that his boss "has no plans to begin impeachment proceedings." But the aide added, "If evidence for impeachment is uncovered, it should be brought before the committee."
Instead, the aide pointed this reporter to a May 17 opinion piece Mr. Conyers wrote for the Washington Post, "No Rush to Impeachment." In it, Mr. Conyers writes that if Democrats win the House, he would not commence impeachment proceedings.
He does, however, point to his proposal for a bipartisan panel to investigate a series of charges ranging from pre-war intelligence manipulation to the intimidation of internal policy critics. "At the end of the process, if — and only if — the select committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, finds evidence of potentially impeachable offenses, it would forward that information to the Judiciary Committee," he writes.
But it is the beginning of this discovery process that has caused some worry for Ms. Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership. Last spring, Ms. Pelosi personally appealed with more liberal Democrats to end their support for the Conyers resolution. Today, that resolution has only 37 co-sponsors.
A staffer for the minority leader said yesterday that he expected oversight regarding the war, and particularly prewar intelligence, to be handled out by the House Government Oversight Committee. But this staffer conceded, "There are jurisdictional issues that need to be worked out if we win a majority." ...
David Swanson, the Washington director of a political action committee that raises money for pro-impeachment candidates, ImpeachPAC, said he was disappointed in Ms. Pelosi.
"I think it is not the place of the broadcast media to demand that our elected officials take positions against protecting our Constitution," Mr. Swanson said. "It is not the place of Congresswoman Pelosi to claim to know where investigations might lead when overwhelming evidence of impeachable offenses is already public knowledge.
But I would encourage people around the country not to lose heart and to understand that a popular movement will be able to persuade chairman Conyers and members of the House Judiciary Committee to move forward, regardless of what Congresswoman Pelosi says on television."
The day the nation demands impeachment is upon us. Sacks and sacks of mail are about to arrive in Nancy Pelosi's office initiating impeachment via the House of Representative's own rules. This legal document is as binding as if a State or if the House itself passed the impeachment resolution (H.R. 635).
There's a little known and rarely used clause of the "Jefferson Manual" in the rules for the House of Representatives which sets forth the various ways in which a president can be impeached. Only the House Judiciary Committee puts together the Articles of Impeachment, but before that happens, someone has to initiate the process.
That's where we come in. In addition to a House Resolution (635), or the State-by-State method, one of the ways to get impeachment going is for individual citizens like you and me to submit a memorial. ImpeachforPeace.org has created a new memorial based on one which was successful in impeaching a federal official in the past. You can find it on their website as a PDF.
You can initiate the impeachment process and simultaneously help to convince Pelosi to follow through with the process. Do-It-Yourself by downloading the memorial, filling in the relevant information in the blanks (your name, state, etc.), and sending it in. Be a part of history.
http://ImpeachForPeace.org/ImpeachNow.html
