Article: Huge Win for Impeachment in Vermont

Finally, it would be impossible for the corporate media to continue to maintain, as it has done for over a year now, that impeachment is simply the desire of a group of fringe left-wing Democrats.

Bush and Cheney are still a long way from being in the dock in Congress, but today’s vote in the Vermont Senate has to have sent a cold chill up the spine of both men, who now have to start contemplating about the fate of Richard Nixon.

Certainly when the late Father Robert Drinan (D-MA) filed his initial impeachment bill against Richard Nixon, who had won re-election by a landslide, no one expected to see the president actually facing impeachment hearings and removal from office. But hearings, and more bills of impeachment, followed, Nixon’s crimes were laid bare on prime time TV, and in the end three articles of impeachment were voted out of the House Judiciary Committee, one of them unanimously. Nixon resigned from office in disgrace when it became clear he would be impeached in the House and removed by the Senate if he tried to stay on.

Slowly, steadily, the public, grassroots movement to impeach this criminal president and vice president, and to restore the rule of law, and the Constitution, is building.

Soon it will be the leaders of Congress, not of the Vermont legislature, who will be facing the wrath of angry voters demanding that they stop dithering and start honoring their oaths of office to uphold and defend the Constitution. As the Brattleboro Reformer put it, Congress is “shirking its responsibility” because when it comes to impeaching Bush and Cheney, “nothing is more important.”

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Update:

In a joint statement issued in Washington, DC, Vermont's Congressional delegation, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch, responded to the state senate resolution by saying that "before we talk about impeachment," current investigations in the Congress need to be "allowed to run their course."

Ignoring the fact that 39 towns in the state, including some it Vermont's larger municipalities, have voted out impeachment resolutions, the three, all Democrats, go on to say, "In our view, the people of Vermont want us to focus our attention on such issues as ending the war in Iraq, protecting the needs of our veterans, raising the minimum wage, addressing the crisis of global warming and providing health care to all of our citizens.”

Never mind that the Democrats' narrow majorities in Congress mean that they cannot hope to deliver on any of those issues in the next two years. More importanbtly, if ever there was a case of elected officials ignoring the clearly expressed will of their constituents, this is it. Not even content to claim that they "know better" than the popular will and are acting on their own best impulses, but rather, claiming to somehow "know" what the people of the state want, Leahy, Sanders and Welch are demonstrating graphically just how divorced the Democratic Party in Congress and the DNC has become from the party's own rank-and-file.

If a vote for the impeachment resolution passes in Vermont's House of Representatives next week, too, and that doesn't sway these three pompous solons into action, Vermonters will have their task cut out for them come November 2008. Welch in particular should be sent packing if he turns his back on his own state's legislature and voters.

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