John Nichols, In Praise of Impeachment

[babylonsister]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=11704

A lot of progressives were perturbed when, immediately after the American people handed the House Democratic Caucus the power to check and balance the Bush presidency, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) repeated her enthusiasm-dampening pledge that “impeachment is off the table.”

But there is nothing new about a Democratic Speaker of the House shying away from the “I” word, even when the leader knows that a Republican president merits official sanction. The same thing happened after Richard Nixon vanquished George McGovern in the 1972 election.

Grassroots Democrats and a few bold members of Congress began suggesting that issues raised by the Watergate burglary and related matters were serious enough to merit discussion of impeachment. House Speaker Carl Albert, House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and most of their compatriots in the Democratic Party knew at the time that, despite the president’s protestations, Nixon was indeed a crook—and by extension, that he and his nefarious inner circle had committed acts that gave definition to the deliberately amorphous term “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Yet, they too took impeachment off the table—and kept it off—until the evolution of the scandal and the popular outcry it inspired forced them to put the most powerful tool in the arsenal of the republic back where it belonged.

Surely, Pelosi’s reticence is frustrating to patriotic Americans who know that we have reached the moment when, to borrow a thought from a Constitutional scholar named James Madison: “it may … be found necessary to impeach the President himself.” But history tells us that Pelosi’s pronouncement ought not be taken seriously, as she is, at best, a bit player in what could yet be an epic drama. Pelosi is a politician of the most cautious school. As such, her post-election assertion ought to be taken about as seriously as George Bush’s pre-election declaration that he wanted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to remain at the Pentagon until the end of the administration’s second term.

Why should we dismiss the Speaker-to-be’s adamant dismissal of impeachment as mere wordplay? Not because Pelosi is secretly plotting impeachment. Rather, because any meaningful movement to impeach a president—and, in the case of the Bush-Cheney administration, a vice president—does not come from the Speaker of the House. The Speaker is, in fact, often the last to know that the Constitutional moment has arrived.

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[EST]

1. Fairly good content, except I thought we had just about hashed

this subject to death and figured out what, why and when.
I also find it offensive when a serious author misuses a word such as "reticence" when he means "reluctance." It makes his work appear to be created for the purpose of being heard, rather than having a thoughtful discussion about strategy.