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War Funding, Impeachment, and Health Care

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David Swanson
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While I consider impeaching Bush and Cheney more important than an election, even if it is the fifth consecutive Most Important Election in Our Lifetime, I have grown tired of hearing misinformed nonsense about how impeachment would hurt the Democrats in the election.  That's what they said when they refused to impeach Reagan for Iran Contra.  Then they lost.  When they went after Nixon, they won.  When the Republicans went after Truman, they won.  

When the Republicans impeached and tried Bill Clinton against the will of a huge majority of the public, they held both houses of Congress and took the White House, losing a few seats in the Senate which had acquitted.  Some of the impeachment leaders won with bigger margins than they had before, and Al Gore was put on the defensive to such an extent that he chose impeachment-advocate Joe Lieberman as a running mate and pretended he'd never met Bill Clinton.  

After the Whigs attempted to impeach Tyler, they picked up seven seats, and Tyler left politics.  Weeks after he lobbied for Johnson's impeachment, Grant was nominated for President.  After pushing toward impeachment for Polk, Lincoln was elected president.  Keith Ellison, who introduced a resolution to impeach Bush and Cheney into the Minnesota state legislature in 2006, was subsequently elected to Congress.

Impeachment hearings on torture and signing statements would be deadly for John McCain's campaign.  Can you imagine McCain defending crime after crime while promising not to commit them and explaining his past flip-flops?  You wouldn't even have to take an impeachment vote.  Just hold the impeachment hearings.

John Conyers' latest excuse for not moving forward on impeachment hearings is that it might hurt Obama's campaign.  Obama was asked recently in Philadelphia about impeachment, indictment, and accountability for Bush and Cheney. He suggested that he MIGHT investigate their crimes AFTER we elect him president, and that he MIGHT prosecute them "if" they were found to have committed crimes. "If"? "If"?

At every stop Obama makes on this endless campaign, people should hand him copies of John Conyers' "The Constitution in Crisis," a book you can buy in most bookstores which documents a long list of criminal offenses committed by Bush and Cheney.

Yes, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is selling books on Bush and Cheney's impeachable offenses while refusing to impeach them.

Does Obama disagree with the book's conclusions? Does he have a response to Bush's public confession to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? Does he question the two Government Accountability Office studies that have found that in a significant percentage of cases, when Bush has announced his right to violate laws through signing statements, he has proceeded to violate those laws? Does Obama now believe the invasion of Iraq and everything that came with it was possibly legal? Was the February 7, 2002, order from Bush allowing the torture of detainees a legal act?

If Obama were to quietly allow impeachment hearings on Cheney or Bush to proceed, he could put McCain on the defensive. Impeachment hearings could squeeze out all coverage of nonsense pseudo issues.  And if the American public understood that voting for Obama would put Bush and Cheney behind bars, and understood it while there's still time to register new voters, you would see a landslide that could not be denied.

If your congress member - Lois Capps perhaps - refuses to see the electoral advantage of impeachment, ask her this: Is there anything at all for which you would risk losing an election?  If so, what in the world can it be?  If not, you are in principle expressing a willingness to support up to two years of mass murder.  And not just in principle.

But isn't it too late for impeachment?

Why?  The movements to impeach Truman and Hoover, and the impeachment of Johnson, happened later than where we are now.  And there is nothing else for Congress to work on.  Ending the occupation requires NOT doing something.  On all other issues, every good bill is vetoed and every mixed bill is signing statemented.  And every non-impeachment investigation either displays evidence of crimes and then doesn't act on it, or gets stonewalled with denials of requests, subpoenas, and even contempt citations.

Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha are gung-ho to fund another year and a half of occupying Iraq, at least that's what their actions suggest as they rush a bill to the floor.  But you'd get an entirely different idea if you listened to what they say.  On February 7th of this year, Murtha released a statement denouncing the funding of the occupation in the harshest terms.

"We are familiar with the visible costs associated with the war in Iraq and the sacrifices that our men and women in uniform and their families are making," he said.  "We are less familiar with the hidden costs associated with the war in Iraq, and these will have long-term consequences.  Every penny of the $535 billion appropriated thus far has been borrowed; this doesn’t even include over $300 billion for the rest of FY08 and FY09.  I’ve been saying for years that you can’t fight an endless war AND cut taxes.  You can’t put a trillion-dollar war on a credit card and leave the bills for our children to pay.  The same Americans sacrificing in Iraq today will be paying for this borrowed war for the rest of their lives.  Since the Iraq war began, the international credibility and respect of the United States has plummeted while instability has grown throughout the region.  This Administration borrows $343 million every day to finance the war in Iraq and continues to shortchange our domestic needs.  We must restore fiscal sanity, and that begins by using the $343 million we are spending every day in Iraq and putting it to use here at home.  4 ½ Weeks in Iraq could double the funding NIH spends on cancer research every year.  Over 1,500 Americans die every day from cancer.  18 Months in Iraq could repair the 70,000+ structurally deficient bridges across America."

"In all my 35 years in Congress," Murtha concluded, "I have never seen a major problem or challenge that hasn't been solved in a bipartisan manner.  Our next President and the American people must understand that it will require tremendous resources and strong bipartisan and international cooperation to begin to solve these challenges.  The future of our great country depends on it."

The next president?  How did we get to the next president?  How did the year from these remarks to the inauguration of the next president cease to exist, and Murtha's actions this month along with it?

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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