Start printing up subpoenas! - Fixer
Then go read this, by David Swanson.
Chairman John Conyers Jr., Chairman Henry Waxman. Those titles will prove to be the most important outcome of yesterday's elections, even if the Dems get the Senate too. It's investigation and impeachment time. Vice President Cheney has already announced his plans to "probably" refuse to obey a subpoena from Congress. Democrats need to be preparing for that crisis now. And I don't mean just elected Democrats. I mean you and everyone you know who has the sanity to no longer call themselves Republicans. I mean you, Harold Meyerson, who published an op-ed in the Washington Post advocating a bait and switch: run on health care and education and then take up impeachment after the election. It is now after the election. I mean you, Arianna Huffington, who argued that impeachment would distract from the election and could be addressed later. It's later now. And before you start whimpering about the 2008 elections looming, consider this ...
A democracy that limits itself to elections will die. A democracy that appears like Brigadoon for a day every two years and then becomes a dictatorship for 729 days is dead. Citizen activism begins today, November 8th. We have a moral duty to impeach and distant elections be damned. But, even so, consider this.
In each of the nine cases in the past when one party has raised impeachment, that party has benefitted in the next elections. In other cases when a party has failed to press for impeachment when the grounds for it were widely known, that party has suffered. (Remember Iran Contra?) And look at what just happened yesterday.
Exit polls reported that voters by a margin of 62-33 percent voted on national, not local, issues. They voted for four, closely-bunched national reasons: corruption, terrorism, the economy, and Iraq. By 57-41 percent they disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq. They didn't give a damn about taxes or "values" or local pork.
Democrats yesterday gained majorities in at least six new state legislatures: New Hampshire, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin. This creates six new bodies that citizens can ask to send impeachment charges to the US House of Representatives. Bills that would do that have already been introduced in three state legislatures: Vermont, Illinois, California. New Jersey activists are hard at work, intent on being the state that comes through.
Whether we get an impeachment or not, we should push for it just so our congresscritters get the message.
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