Both video and transcript were shown of that interview; here's the transcript, from ABC News, "This Week," on Sunday:
STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the other things you see coming out of this are more and more calls for the president to be impeached, Sarah Palin most prominently this week. Any articles of impeachment would be drawn up by your committee. Is this something you're considering? Or do you agree with Speaker Boehner who says it's off the table?
GOODLATTE: We are not working on or drawing up articles of impeachment. The Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment of the president of the United States. He has not committed the kind of criminal acts that call for that.
Easley notes: "Republicans have been calling for this president to be impeached for things that George W. Bush did. Currently, some Republicans want to impeach Obama for Bush's immigration policy. It never stops." And he is correct about that: doing it would be impeaching him "for things that George W. Bush did." And that's why Republicans really don't want to do it.
On June 17th, Sam Stein of Huffington Post headlined similarly, "What Do Top Republicans Fear? Hint: It's Not An Obama Impeachment Vote," and he reported that, "At a briefing at the Republican National Committee headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, top officials from the major GOP campaign committees were in a cheerful mood. The president's approval rating has been teetering on the edge of the toilet seat for several months. [Actually, polls show it's sunk into the toilet.] Generic congressional ballot polls ... toward this fall's elections look good for Republicans." A typical RNC member told Stein: "We've been given a good playing field; now we've got to go out and do the things we are supposed to do from an RNC perspective." Stein asked him about impeaching Obama: "An impeachment could happen, right?" he asked. The answer: "Well, it's not going to." Another of them addressed that same question by saying: "I think Speaker [John] Boehner addressed the impeachment issue pretty aggressively [in the negative]. So I don't think we have to worry about that."
Congressional Democrats would be idiots not to address Obama's impeachment, because their addressing it is the only way they'd not be tied to (as Easley put it) "things that George W. Bush did." And it'd force congressional Republicans to show that they are (or else cause them to vote for impeaching Obama for his being George W. Bush II, which he has been).
If Democrats don't do that, then Barack Obama really is a Democrat, and so, all progressives should then simply abandon that Party, and start their own Progressive Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party then stands for nothing at all.
A Progressive Democratic Party could then campaign against both of the other two as being "the two conservative Parties." Voters would then be able to choose between the Progressive Democratic Party, or else one of the two conservative Parties -- the latter two would then be splitting the conservative vote. The Progressive Democratic Party would have a real chance to win.
Given this possibility (not necessarily a bad one, but it would be bad for today's Democrats in Congress), today's congressional Democrats would stand a far higher likelihood of winning in 2014 if they instead simply push now for Obama's impeachment and subsequent prosecution.
They have their choice to make. And we voters will have ours. But if they choose to be one of two conservative Parties, we voters will then need to form our own Progressive Democratic Party, in order to restore the Party that Franklin Delano Roosevelt built and that the Clintons and Obama have destroyed. Because, if Democrats do not impeach and prosecute Obama, then today's Democratic Party is certainly not that, at all -- it is not progressive, and it will need to be reborn, in order for democracy itself to be meaningful at all in today's America, because, right now, there is no choice but merely two conservative Parties: two Parties that oppose accountability.
As I have said before: Without accountability, there is nothing but dictatorship. That's the reality of our situation. The people who possess power without accountability are our dictators: they stand above the law; we stand below the law, as their subjects, no longer as authentically American citizens, for they have stolen our democracy from us, and made it into their own kingdom, instead. This is not America; and for us to accept it as if it were, would be for us to defile our great Founders, who waged their Revolution in order to defeat such tyrants -- tyrants who now have come back from the dead, only with different faces and names. Our Founders would be in horror to see them. We need to be as progressive as they were. Their Revolution is now in tatters.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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