Impeachment is a forward-looking proposal. It's purpose is to control future presidents. But it's also a present-time proposal aimed at halting the ongoing death and destruction. The threat of impeachment put Nixon on the defensive and helped to end the Vietnam War, while Congress raised the minimum wage and created the Endangered Species Act. Avoiding impeachment, this Congress can only get war bills past the president. We've wasted more time in 2007 avoiding impeachment than any past impeachment effort has taken.
And this impeachment will be an especially fast one, because the evidence is already in front of us. The spying has been confessed to and ruled a felony, the torture has been argued for and witnessed and photographed, the signing statements have been posted online, the threats to Iran have been made on television, etc.
Which brings us to one of the other urgent reasons for impeachment now – averting an attack on Iran. In fact, a White House put on the defensive by an impeachment effort is less likely to commit new crimes or even to veto bills re-criminalizing current crimes, even if the impeachment is not successful.
There's another reason to pursue impeachment, and it turns the thinking of Nancy Pelosi upside down. Pursuing impeachment would actually create a political force and a political party able to dominate Washington's agenda and move it aggressively in a progressive direction. I'll leave it to John Nichols [who spoke after this speech in Chicago] to tell you how impeachment has benefited the parties that have brought it forward. Suffice it to say that if a Democratic president had committed one one-hundredth of the crimes of Bush and Cheney, Republicans would have impeached them and prosecuted them in court a long time ago. And rightly so.
Now, there are a lot of arguments for hesitating, and if you go to http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/resourcecenter you can find all the ones I've heard and the best responses I've heard to them. Jay suggested a few concerns to me that she'd heard around Chicago. One was that we should focus on the election. But we're likely to elect someone who has already said they're willing to attack Iran. And we're guaranteed, if we don't impeach, to pass on to future presidents and vice presidents to knowledge that they can commit crimes and go unpunished, even if the crimes are recriminalized by new legislation.
Another concern was that the Democrats will never act because they are complicit in the crimes. Some of them are not complicit in any of the crimes. And all of them are not complicit in some of the crimes. They're not complicit in signing statements, in outing a CIA agent, in refusing to comply with subpoenas, etc.
Another concern was that impeachment is a trick to channel revolutionary energy back into elections. But I see impeachment and elections as in competition with each other for our attention. Impeachment is the tool the Constitution gives more weight to. Elections are the tool we give more weight to. I want to shift the focus toward impeachment. We don't need to pour all of our energies into choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee when we should be focused on knocking Humpty Dumpty off his wall.
The alternative to impeachment is either submission to fascism or a suicidal, immoral, and impossible attempt at violent revolution. What we need is a nonviolent revolution that imposes the will of the people on our current government – and the way to do that is through impeachment. Writing the Bill of Rights was a positive endeavor. Reinstating it is a positive step.
Reverend Jesse Jackson said this recently. Stand up and repeat after me:
Bush spied. Cheney lied.
Far too many people have died.
It's time they were tried.
It's impeachment time.
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