Impeachment: JUST DO IT

[kpete]

Impeachment: JUST DO IT
By Bob Fertik
Created 2006-02-14 13:25
On TomPaine.com, Constitutional Law professor (and Maryland State Senate candidate) Jamie Raskin devotes 1,440 words to impeachment. After laying out a few of the most important reasons for impeachment, Raskin confronts the reality that Republicans control Congress - and the resulting cowardice of House Democrats who don't want to pick a fight they believe they will lose.

Raskin tries to find a middle ground by dividing impeachment into three "steps" - "moral" impeachment, "electoral" impeachment, and "Congressional" impeachment.

Raskin's hairsplitting analysis brings to mind Shakespeare's character in Henry VI, Part II, who famously said: "First thing we do is kill all the lawyers."

A majority of Americans believe Bush should be impeached both for illegal wiretapping and for lying about Iraq.

Even so, Do-nothing Democrats are offering a million excuses for not getting the ball rolling by introducing Articles of Impeachment.

Let's take our cue from Nike: JUST DO IT!

http://www.democrats.com/impeachment-just-do-it

Impeach: Yes, But...
Jamin B. Raskin
February 14, 2006


Jamin B. Raskin ([email protected] ) is a professor of Constitutional Law at American University and Director of its Program on Law and Government. He is also a Democratic candidate for the Maryland State Senate in the 2006 elections.

As the rule of law shrinks all around us in George W. Bush's second term, many citizens are looking to presidential impeachment as a path back to civilized limits on state power. Indeed, impeachment, as legal historian Raoul Berger once argued, is our major constitutional instrument for defending the rule of law against willful presidents who defy Congress and refuse to accept any constraints on their power.

The Framers made impeachment our key check against presidents with dangerous kingly ambitions. They believed strongly in the “high political purposes served by impeachment” and saw, as Berger put it, that impeachment’s 17th century forerunner—declarations by Parliament that ministerial acts were treasonous—“played a mighty role in the achievement of English liberty.”

Yet in the political opposition today, there is no consensus about impeachment. Registered Democrats all over America jump to their feet and applaud when someone calls for impeaching President Bush. According to a Zogby poll, fully two-thirds of all Democratic voters believe that impeachment proceedings should take place if Bush indeed ordered the wiretapping of U. S. citizens outside the law. To be sure, talk of impeachment is cathartic—but it is also totally serious.

Yet Democrats in Congress have pulled down a curtain of silence over the I-word. They believe that, with mounting corruption woes at home and spiraling war worries from Iraq, the Republicans are about to get their comeuppance anyway in the 2006 midterm elections. With all the stars aligned for victory in November, Democratic leaders in Washington do not want the inexorably nasty politics of impeachment distracting the nation, mobilizing the Republican base and possibly driving away Independent voters at the last minute. They remember the terrible image that stuck to Republican House managers who brought the puritanical case against Clinton—not for political crimes against the state but personal ethical lapses—while most Americans were indeed eager to simply “move on.”

more at:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/14/impeach_yes_but.php