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Abetting Crimes Against the
Constitution
DAVE LINDORFF
Counterpunch
Friday April 20, 2007
The enemies of the Constitution are growing in number and are
to be found now, not just in the White House and the Congress, but
also in state capitals, from Washington to Vermont.
Not only do we have a president and vice president who are almost
daily undermining and rending at the fabric of the Constitution.
Not only do we have Democratic Party leaders actively barring the
party's elected representatives from standing up to the president
by submitting bills of impeachment, as called for in the Constitution.
We now have Democratic Party leaders in state legislatures betraying
Founder Thomas Jefferson, by sabotaging grassroots efforts to get
joint legislative resolutions passed demanding the start of impeachment
proceedings in the House.
Thomas Jefferson, a complex and personally deeply conflicted human
being was, as a philosopher of government, incredibly prescient.
Not only did he foresee the critical need for a section laying out
the inalienable rights of man in the nation's founding document.
He also understood the concept of a "beltway bubble" long
before there were even paved roads, much less interstate highway
beltways.
Jefferson understood that a monomaniacal and unprincipled president,
particularly in time of war or national crisis, could intimidate
members of Congress-particularly a weak Congress riven by political
rivalries-and prevent that body from going forward with impeachment.
He understood that members of Congress themselves, remote geographically
and politically from their constituents, could eventually become
so isolated they would fail to act in accordance with the wishes
of the voters who sent them to Washington. That's why Jefferson
came up with an alternative way of initiating impeachment proceedings,
in addition to the standard Constitutionally-prescribed method of
having a House member submit an impeachment bill. His solution,
laid out in his Manual of the Rules of the House, was to allow a
joint resolution by any state's legislature calling for impeachment
to also require the House to initiate impeachment.
Over the past year, there have been grassroots campaigns underway
in at least 10 states to get such resolutions passed.
Unfortunately, the Democratic leaders of a number of state legislatures,
working in collusion with, or at the direction of even more craven
Democratic Party leaders in Washington, are undermining Jefferson,
and are sabotaging his carefully crafted mechanism for defending
and protecting the Constitution and ensuring the survival of democratic
freedoms.
In New Mexico, Democratic leaders in the state senate, after earlier
voting in favor of an impeachment resolution, suddenly turned around
and defeated a procedural effort to bring an impeachment resolution
to the floor for a vote, effectively killing the measure. A similar
effort was made by party leaders in the Washington State Senate,
though a second effort to get that bill, Senate 8016, to a floor
vote will be made tomorrow (Friday).
In Vermont, where 38 town meetings in March all voted out impeachment
resolutions, and called on the state's legislature to pass an impeachment
resolution, the Democratic leaders of the state House and Senate
are apparently blocking attempts to move a resolution to a floor
vote (where it would likely pass).
In each case, there is evidence that Congressional leaders in Washington,
often with the assistance of members of each state's own Congressional
delegation, have been leaning on Democratic legislative leaders
in the statehouses, to pressure them to kill the impeachment resolutions.
This tactic represents a grotesque betrayal of Thomas Jefferson,
who expressly saw the state legislative resolution route to impeachment
as a way of letting the public, at the state level, send a message
to Congress, not the other way around. By squelching such efforts
from Washington, the Democratic Party is using top-down power to
undermine the popular will.
Polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans, and an
overwhelming majority of Democrats, want to see the president impeached
and brought up on charges for lying to put the country into an illegal
war, for illegally ordering the National Security Agency to spy
on Americans without a warrant, for abusing power by invalidating
acts of Congress, for ordering torture, for covering up the outing
of a CIA undercover agent, and for myriad other crimes. Yet the
Democratic Party leadership has decided that it is in the Democratic
Party's short-term interest to ignore these dangerous assaults on
the Republic and the Constitution. The thinking among party leaders
is that by laying low and doing little, Democrats can reap gains
in the 2008 national election.
Maybe they're right about that. Maybe they're not. But impeachment
in any case is not about partisan gain. It is a process mandated
by the Constitution when freedom is under threat. Every member of
Congress took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution from
attack by enemies foreign and domestic.
We all know that the Bush administration is wrecking the Constitution,
and that it is trying to turn the presidency into an all-powerful
dictatorship.
In the face of that assault, the national Democratic Party, far
from standing up for the Constitution and for democracy, is proving
to be an abettor in the crime.
Now state party leaders are showing themselves to be just as craven
and cowardly.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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