Impeachment: Breaking the Dam in Olympia, Washington

[Flabbergasted]

http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/022407Lindorff.shtml

If the state of Washington ends up passing a joint legislative resolution next month calling on the US House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney, it will because 900 people who crammed into Olympia’s Center for the Performing Arts last Tuesday evening, and countless others across the state, pushed them into it.

The crowd at the arts center had come to attend an event organized by the Citizens Movement to Impeach Bush/Cheney, a local ad hoc citizens’ organization in this little burg that had convinced the local city council to make the 1000-seat auditorium available for a hearing on impeachment.
When I and my two co-speakers, CIA veteran Ray McGovern and former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, came out on the stage, we all felt not like political speakers or authors, but like rock stars. The applause was deafening, not just at the start of the program, but after each speaker’s points were made.

It was clear that even if the Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says impeachment is “off the table,” a sizeable hunk of the American public is hungering for a taste of it.

Washington is one of a group of states where a serious effort is underway to pass joint legislative resolutions that, thanks to Rules of the House penned by Thomas Jefferson and in effect for nearly length of the Republic, would put impeachment back on the table at the House right under Speaker Pelosi’s nose. The significance of the gathering in Olympia is that a freshman senator from Olympia, Eric Oemig, has introduced a bill in the state senate calling for such a resolution. His bill, S6018, is slated to go to a hearing on March 1, to determine whether it can be considered by the full senate, and impeachment activists are planning to have hundreds—perhaps thousands—of backers on hand to make sure it gains committee approval.

“We don’t hear any of our leaders today talking about impeachment,” Oemig told the crowd. “So the fact that the grass roots have built up the way they have is remarkable!”

[neilepi]

1. Could be the beginnings of something more than just talk and speculation

Excellent article.

Anti-Bush, America Deserves Better and Molly Ivins Quotations

[intheflow]

2. I pray that this passes.

I dont' understand that whole "Impeachment is off the table" buy-in by the American public. Just because one person, one Democratic leader, said it? What is democracy if not many voices, many people, guiding elected leaders? Just 'cause Pelosi said it doesn't make it unequivacably, unchageably true.

We the people can make it happen. We should make it happen. We need to make it happen.