Conyers Asking for Rebuttals to his Objections to Impeachment

Time for change

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Mon Jun-09-08 06:40 PM
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Conyers Asking for Rebuttals to his Objections to Impeachment

Edited on Mon Jun-09-08 06:49 PM by Time for change

The National Impeachment Network reports that on June 5th, John Conyers agreed to meet with a group of CodePinkers to discuss impeachment, challenging them to try to rebut his objections to impeachment.

We all know that Conyers has very ambivalent feelings about impeachment. On the one hand, we know that he would love to see it done, as proven by his great 345 page report of August 2006, �The Constitution in Crisis � The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance�, in which he lays out an airtight case for impeachment, with 1,401 references. In the introduction to his report, Congress thanks the blogosphere for all the help they provided him in the writing of his report:

I would like to give credit to the �blogosphere� for its myriad and invaluable contributions to me and my staff. Absent the assistance of �blogs� and other internet based media, it would have been impossible to assemble all the information, sources and other materials necessary to the preparation of this report. Whereas the so-called �mainstream media� has frequently been willing to look past the abuses of the Bush administration, the blogosphere has proven to be a new and important bulwark of our Nation�s first amendment freedoms.

But on the other hand, he is very worried about the consequences of a failed impeachment attempt, and also he is wary about going against the Democratic Party leadership on this issue. His ambivalence can be clearly seen in a transcript and video of a January 2008 interview with Rob Kall of Op-Ed News, where Conyers actually says that �impeachment is ON the table�, but for various reasons he is reluctant to proceed �at this time�. Conyers� current objections to impeachment are:

 The majority of Americans don�t want impeachment.
 The corporate media will slay us.
 There is not enough time.
 There are not enough votes.
 It could cost us the 2008 election.

The following are my answers to those objections.

The majority of Americans don�t want impeachment

You can see from this list of polls, most which were obtained when George Bush was more popular than he is now, that the percent of Americans responding positively to impeachment polls varies usually between over 30% and over 50%, depending upon how the poll is worded. At the high end, polls that say �hold accountable through impeachment� or �consider impeaching� show a clear majority in favor, such as 53% to 42% in this poll, or 52% to 43% in this one. At the other end, polls which actually mention removal from office usually show only around 30% to 45% in favor.

There are two very important things to consider about these polls. First, holding an impeachment hearing is the equivalent of Congress �considering impeachment� � which most Americans favor. Polls which actually mention removal from office are understandably less likely to be met with a favorable response because there are many Americans who feel uncomfortable enough with what Bush and Cheney are doing to our country that they want to see impeachment pursued, but they are not yet convinced enough that they are willing to say that they should be removed from office.

More important is the fact that most Americans have little or no understanding of the extent and seriousness of the many crimes that Bush and Cheney have committed, because of the appalling lack of substantive coverage by our corporate news media. Once impeachment hearings get underway, our corporate news media will be forced to cover them. Most Americans will then become much better educated about the issues than they are now, and the percent that are in favor of removal from office will likely go through the roof, as happened with Richard Nixon when his crimes were exposed during the televised Watergate hearings. The fact that nearly 50% of Americans already are in favor of impeachment, despite the lack of substantive media coverage, should be seen as very ominous for the Bush administration.

The corporate media will slay us

Undoubtedly, most of the corporate media will indeed attempt to slay us, just as they always attempt to slay Democrats, especially around election time. In other words, most corporate talking heads will attempt to spin the situation to make the impeachment hearings appear to be spiteful acts of vengeance or a dirty political scheme unworthy of serious statesmen.

But it�s a lot easier to get away with spinning things that people don�t get to see for themselves. When our corporate media repeatedly said during the 2000 election campaign that Al Gore was a liar, most uninformed people had no way to judge that statement, so some chose to believe it and others didn�t. But when people actually see on television the evidence presented against Bush and Cheney, it will be very difficult for the corporate media to spin that evidence into something other than the high crimes that it points to.

It all comes down to the question of whether or not the Democratic Party is willing to let the corporate media define the two parties and what they stand for, or whether they choose to fight back and present their case directly to the American people. Ultimately, if they choose to let the corporate media define politics in our country, the wealthy and powerful corporate elite will become our masters even more than they are today. That is the road to fascism. We are already well along that road. If we don�t fight back we will soon reach the point where turning back will be next to impossible without a violent upheaval that few Americans are ready for.

There is not enough time

The impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton took very little time. In Bush and Cheney�s case, a vast amount of evidence has already been accumulated. In fact, John Conyers himself summed up the evidence in his 2006 report as follows:

The report finds there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people � The Report concludes that a number of these actions amount to prima facie evidence that federal criminal laws have been violated� The Report also concludes that these charges clearly rise to the level of impeachable conduct.

And a vast amount of additional evidence has accumulated since Conyers conducted his investigation and made that statement. In other words, the evidence is already there. It is just a matter of getting it together and presenting it to the American people.

There are not enough votes

In many ways the argument that there are not enough votes for conviction of Bush and Cheney for impeachable offenses is analogous to a prosecuting attorney who is considering an indictment for murder deciding against doing so because he believes there are not enough votes on the jury. That is an absurd argument because nobody expects the votes to be there until the trial has been conducted. But admittedly, my example of the murder trial is a somewhat different situation than impeachment because impeachment hearings and trials in the Senate for conviction of impeachable offenses are generally more political in nature than simple murder trials. So let�s consider this from the political angle.

Granted, the current crop of Senate Republicans are largely hard core conservatives who don�t give a damn about our Constitution or the Bush/Cheney administration�s repeated violations of it. So why bother even trying? Aside from the fact that it is the right thing to do, and that failing to even try to impeach Bush and Cheney would condone their numerous criminal violations of our Constitution, there are a couple of other good reasons to discount what some consider to be the current lack of votes for conviction in the Senate.

As conservative and conscienceless as most of our Republican Senators are, most of them want to remain in the Senate. When the American public is presented over a period of several weeks or months with the accumulated evidence of high crimes committed by the Bush/Cheney administration, and as their outrage grows and Bush�s poll numbers plummet to new lows, I suspect that a number of Republican Senators will opt for self-preservation at the expense of loyalty to a sinking presidential administration.

But if they don�t, at least we will have one big consolation: Just imagine what our new Senate will look like in 2009.

It could cost us the 2008 election

Consider the attempt to impeach Richard Nixon. (The Clinton impeachment hearings are not comparable because Clinton had done nothing that could be considered an impeachable offense, and most Americans were well aware of that). The Nixon impeachment hearings, on the other hand, provide the most similar example in U.S. history to potential Bush/Cheney impeachment hearings, except that Bush and Cheney�s crimes are more numerous and serious than Nixon�s.

As a result of evidence obtained from hearings of the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to investigate events surrounding the break-in at the Watergate Hotel and other abuses of Presidential power by Richard Nixon, House Democrats initiated impeachment hearings against Nixon in October 1973. As impeachment hearings progressed and as more and more evidence of impeachable offenses accumulated, U.S. public opinion turned against Nixon, and eventually his own Republican Party turned against him, thus forcing him to resign in August 1974. In the 1974 mid-term elections Democrats gained 48 seats in the House and 5 seats in the Senate. In order to �heal our nation�s wounds�, our new President, Gerald Ford, appointed by Nixon as Vice President shortly prior to Nixon�s resignation, preemptively pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed that were related to the impeachment charges against him. Many believe that that pardon was a major factor in Ford�s defeat in the 1976 Presidential election.

In conclusion

Elizabeth Holtzman, former U.S. Congresswoman from New York, who was an active participant on the U.S. House Committee handling the impeachment of Richard Nixon, had this to say on the issue of George Bush�s impeachment:

Our country's Founders provided the power of impeachment to prevent the subversion of the Constitution. President Bush has subverted and defied the Constitution in many ways. His defiance and his subversion continue.

Failure to impeach Bush would condone his actions. It would allow him to assume he can simply continue to violate the laws on wiretapping and torture and violate other laws as well without fear of punishment. He could keep the Iraq War going or expand it even further than he just has on the basis of more lies, deceptions and exaggerations� Worse still, if Congress fails to act, Bush might be emboldened to believe he may start another war, perhaps against Iran, again on the basis of lies, deceptions and exaggerations.

There is no remedy short of impeachment to protect us from this President, whose ability to cause damage in the next two years is enormous. If we do not act against Bush, we send a terrible message of impunity to him and to future Presidents and mark a clear path to despotism and tyranny. Succeeding generations of Americans will never forgive us for lacking the nerve to protect our democracy.

Those words are just as applicable today as they were last year.

Since John Conyers is welcoming arguments that would help him make up his mind, if you agree that Bush and Cheney should be impeached, please consider writing Conyers to tell him so. In doing so, please feel free to use any combination of the arguments in this post, verbatim, or with any changes you feel are appropriate. Conyers� contact information is included here.