New Efforts To Impeach Bush And

Cheney

By James Donahue

You wouldn’t know it if you are depending on your nightly television news channels, but the revelations by former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan has stirred new movements to bring impeachment hearings against both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Congressman Robert Wexler, who has been consistently thwarted in his efforts to launch impeachment hearings and is currently involved in a legal battle to force former Bush Administrative Assistant Karl Rove to testify before the Judiciary Committee, says information now being revealed by McClellan is giving new teeth to the movement.

At the same time, Congressman Dennis Kucinich is renewing his call for the impeachment of President Bush. This week Kucinich presented 35 articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives. His resolution charges Bush with “high crimes and misdemeanors” and calls for the articles of impeachment to be exhibited to the United States Senate.

Impeachment must, by Constitutional law, be initiated by the House, and then passed on to the Senate to be carried out. Hearings do not necessarily mean that the president and vice-president will be impeached, but they will force the release of information that to date has been withheld from public view by presidential order.

In a news release Wexler said Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers officially invited McClellan to testify under oath on Friday, June 20, as to what he knows about the propaganda campaign used to gain support of the media and the American people that the attack on Iraq was necessary.

“This hearing provides us our first genuine opportunity to enter the public consciousness and change the dynamics that have prevented true accountability for Bush and Cheney,” Wexler said.

He said the McClellan book reveals that “Rove, Scooter Libby and Cheney lied about their role in revealing the identity of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, actions amounting to obstruction of justice.”

The book also charges that there was “a coordinated effort within the Bush Administration to use propaganda to pump up the case for the Iraq war and hide the projected cost of the war from the public.”

To date, Wexler said, “Karl Rove has thumbed his nose to the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena – joining Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten and Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff David Addington as the only administrative officials in history to claim Congress has no power to even bring them before a committee to be questioned. I have called for Karl Rove to be held in inherent contempt and for the other renegade officials to appear as required by their subpoenas, or be forced to do so by the House Sergeant of Arms.”

Kucinich, who was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2004 and again this year, filed impeachment articles against Cheney in 2007, and made an unsuccessful attempt to file them against Bush in January of this year. He was blocked by Congress in both attempts.

Before leaving office in January, 2007, Democratic Representative Cynthia McKinney also made an unsuccessful effort to introduce articles of impeachment against President Bush. McKinney is now a Green Party candidate for president.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made it clear that impeachment would “not be on the table.” She did not explain. One analyst suggested that Pelosi feels she is protecting a delicate balance between her party’s left, where impeachment is a major issue, and the moderates who fear that raising the issue would repel voters in the swing districts that Democrats want to win to regain a House majority in November elections.

Kucinich argues that “impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran.” And there are clearly rumors that Bush and Cheney may well be plotting with Israeli military leaders some kind of plot to conduct a bombing raid against Iran before their term is up.

Looking even beyond the Kucinich argument, even if an attack on Iran can be successfully blocked without impeachment hearings, failure to force such hearings will allow Bush, Cheney and their entire administration to slip out of office in January without having to answer to a long list of allegations that not only include launching an unprovoked war of aggression but violating international laws prohibiting torture of war prisoners, dismantling of the U.S. Constitution, secret spying on American citizens, using executive order to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its teeth, and a long list of other issues that make a list too long to include in a single article.

We believe such hearings would go a long way to regain America’s prestige in the world since they would not only force the Bush Administration’s closed-door operations out into public view, but may pave the way for an International Court Tribunal to consider trying both Bush and Cheney for war crimes.

That, and perhaps only that, would show the world that America is still a great nation capable of fixing its own government when things get this far out of whack.