{news} The Fierce Urgency of Impeachment by David Swanson

[Justine McCabe]

"The Green party publicly stands for impeachment. Every other party should 
join them."

 http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1004/32/

The Fierce Urgency of Impeachment
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
by David Swanson

Remarks at Emergency Impeachment Conference in New York City, February 17, 
2007


It's an honor to be speaking with these panelists and it's great to be back 
in New York. But I want to ask you one thing about New York, because there's 
something I heard Senator Hillary Clinton say and I want to know if it's 
true. Is it true that if you live in New York you have to support this war? 
Can you live in New York and work for peace?

That's what I thought.

I got up at 2 a.m. this morning in Charlottesville, Va., my town and the 
town of Thomas Jefferson, the man whose greatest fear for our republic was 
of elected despotism. Jefferson and Madison and Mason and the others who 
drafted the most influential Constitution the world has seen, created a 
system of elections, but devoted much more attention and many more words to 
creating a system for maintaining our democracy in between elections. They 
gave this essential power to the House of Representatives, as the branch 
most subject to popular control, and they called this power impeachment.

The founders knew that democracy could only be maintained through eternal 
vigilance. But we - or perhaps more G.E. and Disney than we - have 
substituted for eternal vigilance an eternal election season. I don't know 
if the founders could have imagined the way in which elections are killing 
our democracy, but they certainly imagined that the loss of the power of 
impeachment would mean a return to tyranny.

No one can say exactly how long our window of opportunity is to get 
impeachment up and running before it's effectively blocked by the November 
2008 election. Is it too late already? Do we have two months? Three months? 
Four months? Wiser minds than mine seem inclined to think we may have until 
roughly the end of April to get the impeachment process up and running. That 
doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pushing until January 2009 if need be. But it 
does mean that if you or your organization are on the edge of accepting the 
need for impeachment you should bear in mind that it will be much more 
helpful for you to make that decision right now than later this year or next 
year.


Seventeen Republicans took a tiny step forward against the war on Friday. 
They did that because Republican voters are turning against Bush and Cheney. 
Republicans should think very hard about something. Do you, as a Republican, 
want future Democratic presidents to have the ability to rewrite laws with 
signing statements? Do you want them to have the ability to spy on you with 
no legal oversight? I know Libertarians don't want that. Congressman Ron 
Paul says Bush should be impeached, but Congressman Paul has not found the 
nerve to do anything about it - yet.

The Green party publicly stands for impeachment. Every other party should 
join them.

Impeachment is not a means of empowering a party. It's a way to empower the 
American people and the first branch of our government, the Congress. But 
the fact is that if the Democratic Party takes a stand for impeachment, it 
will gain the respect and support of Americans and of people all over the 
world, and it will be rewarded. When the Democrats failed to impeach Reagan 
for Iran-Contra, thinking they could thereby win elections, they lost 
elections and put George Bush I in power - and we are suffering from that 
still. Americans do not vote for cowardice. They voted for Democrats 
post-Nixon, but not post-Reagan.

The current crop of Democrats has shown that it will not act to end the war 
without some sort of kick-start, something to strengthen the hand of 
opponents of Bush and Cheney. Impeachment is the one thing that might shift 
the balance.

A labor union member and peace activist sent me an Email yesterday that 
said: If the peace movement wants to succeed, we can't fail to employ the 
threat of impeachment any more than a union can promise never to go on 
strike.

Right now, unions are lobbying hard to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, 
which would restore the right to effectively organize unions in this 
country. But Cheney has promised to have Bush veto it. It is time for unions 
to threaten a strike. In politics a strike is called impeachment.

Environmental organizations are concerned that we only have to many years to 
reverse our energy policy if we are going to reverse global warming. But any 
bills to do that will be vetoed or signing statemented. You cannot tell me 
that you care about global warming and that you're willing to sit on your 
hands for two full years because impeachment is not your focus. It had 
better become your focus or the rest of us are going to learn about global 
warming the hard way.

Pick an issue, any issue, and a compelling case can be made that your 
priority for the next few months should be impeachment. Failing to pursue 
impeachment will mean two more years of war, detention, torture, and abuse, 
and the defunding of every useful public project. Two years is a quarter of 
the Bush, Cheney presidency. Pick any past two years of that presidency, and 
you have an idea of the catastrophe we're facing. The results of it will 
last well beyond the end of the two years.

To recognize the gravity of the impeachable offenses that Cheney and Bush 
have committed and yet not work to end them because your focus is elsewhere 
is, in many cases, to lose your focus. A citizen who does not work for 
impeachment when it is merited is a neighbor who watches a murder and does 
not intervene. We're all busy. We all have vitally important missions. But 
that's a murder outside the window. You wouldn't watch and do nothing. But 
the Bush Administration is killing hundreds of thousands of people every 
year by acts of commission and omission, people of Iraq, of Africa, of New 
Orleans, of the world. And if we fail to impeach, we will establish the 
precedent to allow future presidents to do the same and worse.

Impeachment is the nonviolent answer to this crisis. We should feel no 
animosity toward any human being, and we should condemn all acts of 
violence. This is absolutely essential if we are to succeed. But we should 
act with deliberateness and determination to restore the rule of law and 
hold accountable those who would place themselves above it.



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