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December 22, 2007 - 2:48pm.
Partnership vs. Partisanship
"I accept this gavel in the spirit of partnership, not partisanship, and look forward to working with you on behalf of the American people. In this House, we may belong to different parties, but we serve one country."
Nancy Pelosi, after being elected Speaker of the House, 2006.
Funny how one's words can come back to haunt you.
In the early heady days of January, there was a veritable buzz in the air. Change was a'comin. The Evil Empire of Bush/Cheney was finally derailed, and the Constitution was about to be restored.
Then Nancy got ahold of the gavel. Her first major statement was to take impeachment "off the table." While her intention may have been to quiet the rancor and hatred between the parties, it had the opposite effect. It showed the GOP minority that the new speaker was weak, ineffectual, short-sighted, and constantly willing to seek accommodation and compromise.
How would any self-respecting GOPer, including Bush/Cheney respond? In retrospect, it was obvious. For 15 years, the GOP was used to rough handling by its leaders. Those leaders managed to keep diverse groups within the GOP in line, and under control. Their unanimity surprised many while they were the majority. Why would anyone be surprised if they maintained it as the minority?
As for the president, her promise to protect the president and the presidency from impeachment was like a red flag to a raging bull. The more he demanded, the more Pelosi would give in. Which in turn, caused him to demand that much more.
Today, Nancy claims to be shocked by the coordination and uniform stances taken by the GOP in Congress. She was "surprised" by their behavior.
Nancy, Nancy, Nancy. You have been in office since 1987, and you claim to be surprised at the GOP? Are you the most incredibly naive politician in the universe, or is something else at play?
Well, let's take a look. You voted in favor of Patriot Act 1 without even reading the damned bill. You supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. You have stopped Democrats from complaining about Israel wall-building, take over of Palestinian settlements and the continued illegal construction of Israeli settlements and compounds. You stopped a congressional investigation of the illegal use of cluster bombs by the Israeli military on civilian areas.
AIPAC thanked you in 2005, and asked you to be the keynote speaker that year. And just this year, you played messenger girl from Prime Minister Olmert to the Syrian president.
And of course, there is the little matter of your cave-in. On Patriot I(b), FISA, Iraq, Iraq, SCHIP, SCHIP II, and pretty much every other issue.
This week, the president insulted you, demeaned your leadership abilities, then ordered you to behave next year. Given the tone of your response, I presume that you heard your orders loud and clear, and are preparing to act next year in the same depressing, disgusting, spineless way as you acted this last week, may, month. Naw, let's be accurate. You have spoken loudly and carried a big twig this entire year. That's not leadership, that's stenography.
When you promised a new tone in congress, little did we suspect that it would be the same as the old tone, only with a new face. As promised, you have become a partner, not a partisan. Except that you have partnered with your AIPAC buddies in the DLC, you have partnered with your GOP friends in Congress, and you have partnered with the White House, leaving America desperate for even a hint of a spinal column.
Worst of all, at the end of this disaster, you took the stage with DLC stooge Rahm Emanuel, and you claimed victory. VICTORY! WHERE? HOW? ON WHAT ISSUE? Oh, yes, Energy and minimum wage.
Nancy, claiming victory under present circumstances is like you squatting & pissing on the great Chicago Fire, and claiming that you personally stopped the conflagration.
And still our constitution remains tattered, in danger of irrelevancy, and further abuse by this president and his criminal cabal.
Shame on you, Madam Speaker. Your failures far outweigh your successes. If you had a shred of decency left, a sense of honor, an understanding of your constitutional duties, you would resign the speakership immediately. You would allow someone, anyone, with a spine, a sense of reality, and an urgent goal (to fix our nation) take over for you. You have been measured, Ms. Pelosi, and you have been found wanting."
Did you sign it like I did, readers?
Conyers Doesn't Care About Wexler's Petition: He W...
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From Democracy Now Interview with Conyers: He Doesn’t Care About Wexler’s Petition.
Posted by willyloman on December 22, 2007
by Scott Creighton
http://www.petitiononline.com/everyman/petition.html
I hate to be the wet blanket, again, but an Amy Goodman’s interview with John Conyers shows us that he is spouting the same “no impeachment” talking points that Pelosi has given us. Even in the face of 100,000 plus signatures on Wexler’s petition supporting simply bringing Kucinich’s resolution to impeach Cheney to the table in the Judiciary Committee. Read for yourself, and then check out my summary at the end. Conyers will NOT allow the hearings on impeachment! No matter how many sign.
from DemocracyNow:
Democracy Now: An Interview With Conyers On Impeachment AMY GOODMAN:Congressman Conyers, I wanted to turn to another controversial issue, one that you’ve been dealing with and have over time, that issue of impeachment. Now, three Democratic members of your committee, of the House Judiciary Committee-Robert Wexler of Florida, Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin-have called on you to begin impeachment hearings against Vice President Dick Cheney. This week, Congressman Wexler said the charges against the Vice President are too serious to ignore.
- REP. ROBERT WEXLER: It is time for the House Judiciary Committee to hold impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney. We have an obligation to ask questions, to determine whether in fact the Vice President purposefully manipulated intelligence, bringing us into war, whether he knowingly ordered the illegal use of torture, whether he knowingly exposed covert agents for political purposes, whether he obstructed federal investigations. These charges are too serious to ignore.
AMY GOODMAN: Since last week, over 100,000 people have signed a petition on Congressman Wexler’s website supporting impeachment hearings. And we’re wondering, Congressman Conyers, now with your committee members taking up this issue, an issue that you actually long championed, what your feelings are today. Will you be supporting them in this?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, no, but there are a lot of things that can and will be done. We’re documenting the transgressions and errors of the administration in the Department of Justice, which have led to the firing of nine US attorneys. We’re looking at the protections of the right to vote. The election is coming up. We’ve got to protect everybody’s right to get out here and make a choice and make sure that it’s counted.
AMY GOODMAN: Why stop short of hearings on impeachment?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, because, unless we’re going to impeach the Vice President and the President within this space of time, I think we could be very seriously compromising the greatest important-most important thing, in addition to documenting any misdeeds that may have happened, whether we continue to have Bush enablers continue to shatter and tear the Constitution to shreds. And so, all of this, academically, is great. I’ve got a number of books from my friends about which articles would be best and which ones we should go after more. But it seems to me that the time element and also the feasibility of whether or not there is any possible chance of success-there is a very stark reality that with the corporatization of the media, we could end up with turning people who should be documented in history as making many profound errors and violating the Constitution from villains into victims. And those are the kinds of considerations that have entered my mind in thinking about this process, Amy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Ray McGovern, you’ve been outspoken on this issue, and given the new evidence now about the destruction of the CIA tapes and the White House staff-some staff involvement in that, your sense of the impeachment situation?
RAY McGOVERN: Well, we not only have the obstruction of justice, but we have the President’s former spokesman saying that he was involved in the outing of Valerie Plame. We also have the President threatening World War III on bogus evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapons development program. So, you know, it’s sort of like outreach fatigue. Where do you begin?
Well, where I would begin is with the demonstrably impeachable offenses-first and foremost, the President’s not only admission, but his bragging about violating laws against eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant. He bragged that he did that thirty times. That was one of the articles of impeachment voted against President Nixon. Similarly, disregarding subpoenas, that, too, was one of the articles voted against President Nixon in the Judiciary Committee, where Congressman Conyers, of course, served very loyally. So you have those two right there.
And that’s not even mentioning, you know, forging, manufacturing, coming up with false intelligence to deceive congressmen and senators out of their constitutional prerogative to declare or to otherwise authorize war. I mean, it doesn’t get any worse than that. And so, my sense is that our founders are probably turning over in their grave at this point, because they put the impeachment clause in the declarative mood, not the subjunctive mood. They didn’t say that-
JUAN GONZALEZ: But, Ray McGovern, what about the argument that Congressman Conyers raises that given the short amount of time left in the term of the President and the difficulty of actually being able to vote out an impeachment, that it would divert much of the attention of the Democratic Party in a way that would not necessarily lead to victory?
RAY McGOVERN: I think what I hear Congressman Conyers saying is that Fox News would have a field day if he didn’t get 218 votes right off the bat. That is not an explanation, in my view. If you read Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, which I think should be the document we abide by, it says the President, Vice President, other senior officials shall be removed from office upon impeachment for and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors. Congressman Conyers and his staff, a year ago, came up with a 350-page indictment of all the offenses against the Constitution that Bush had already been guilty of. So I don’t really understand the delay.
I’m wondering if there isn’t some sort of crass political reason for it, namely, don’t make any waves. The President’s numbers are in the toilet. The Vice President’s numbers are flushed down the toilet. Just don’t do anything at all, so that Fox News will have nothing to seize upon in accusing the Democrats of being divisive or something like that. I don’t think that’s the right constitutional approach, and I feel very strongly about that, and many of my colleagues do, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Conyers, more than 100,000 people signed the impeachment petition on Congressman Wexler, your colleague in the House Judiciary Committee’s website. Your response to this growing call in the United States?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, I’ve been monitoring the growing call. I’ve been going to many meetings to talk about this. But this isn’t a Fox 2 event. As bad as they may be, it doesn’t mean that the rest of them won’t chime in, as well. And I think that that has a great deal to do with whether we’re going to continue Bush enablers in the White House, and, to me, that is not a small event. And the Constitution doesn’t read into us the other considerations of timing, whether you have the votes, whether it will have a reverse effect. They didn’t put all that in, and for very good reason. And so, I’m hoping that we can continue this discussion, but that what I’m doing this morning is holding hearings to reveal the fact that there ought to be public knowledge of what’s going on in all these attempts at secret hearings on the destruction of these tapes. And I think that will lead us-help lead us to what we must ultimately do. So-
AMY GOODMAN: These numbers, Congressman Conyers, quickly, American Research Group, 45% of Americans would back impeachment proceedings against Bush, 54%-that’s more than half the American people-would back the same against Cheney. Your response?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, I respect whoever they are, but I’ve got to produce the votes inside the Congress, and that’s where our first battle is going to be. I had Ray McGovern in my first Downing Street memos hearings in the basement a few years back, in which we revealed that the war in Iraq was more preemptive than anything else. But marching into history, I’ve got to put together a winning program and not step on our message. We’ve got a lot of legislation to accomplish. The minority party in the House has been-and the Senate, too-have been very effective in preventing us from moving forward. And we’ve got-
AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Conyers, we’re going to leave it there but go to one of those issues that has been so troubling for so many in this country, and that is what’s happening in New Orleans. We’re going to turn to a piece now about the demolition of public housing. We want to thank you very much, Chairman Conyers, for joining us, head of the House Judiciary Committee, and Ray McGovern, longtime CIA analyst, actually was the daily briefer for President Bush-that’s President George H.W. Bush when he was Vice President.
It’s very important to see what is really going to come from Wexler’s petition. What I have started is a LEGAL way to remove Pelosi as Speaker of the House.
Don’t be fooled: we CAN “get the votes” if the Speaker uses her power behind the scenes to build a bi-partisan consensus. But she won’t and people like Conyers know it. So they won’t stick their necks out to be whacked by their own leader.
That’s what they mean by “we don’t have the votes”. Pelosi must go. And this is how we do it.
Never before has a President and Vice President deserved to be impeached more than these.
Yet our Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is working behind the scenes with House Democrats, not to build a consensus for impeachment, but to do just the opposite: to keep others from succeeding in their effort to hold this president accountable by means of impeachment.
With the FISA bill still looming in the Senate, and a new war funding bill passed with no structure in place to Bring our Troops Home, we have to show the leaders of the House and Senate that this is still our country.
Please read the petition to replace Pelosi with a Democratic Representative who will bring impeachment proceedings to the floor. A Question of Privilege under House Rules IX can declare the Speaker seat vacant.
It can be done, it must be done. We have waited long enough.
willyloman"
I HATE Conyers now, that fucking senile old fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What about the RULE of LAW and CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY, Tommer?
