Today's Pseudo-Impeachment Hearing

Addendum to this post added this evening.

The Impeachment Hearings are today at 10AM EST. C-SPAN will televise and Pacifica Radio will air it.


On June 9th, one of our best senators, Dennis Kucinich submitted 35 Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other top White House officials.


You can view each criminal charge against him at the end of my June article, May They All Fall Like Dominoes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat) is the most powerful woman in America. If Bush and Cheney were impeached, she'd be running things.


Pelosi has always said the issue was off the table. Kucinich's recent attempt wasn't the first but did add on more articles. Cynthia McKinney, (currently the Green Party Presidential nominee), was the first to try to get an impeachment hearing.


As I recall, Pelosi expressed the view it was "partisan politics". In laymen's terms, this means the Dems got a feud against the Repubs, rather than the case against Bush actually having any merit. Neither she nor a number of Democrats in Congress or the Senate wanted a full House vote on impeachment.


Kucinich, however, called for an emergency congressional meeting when he submitted the Articles of Impeachment. He will testify today and have at least one mystery witness.

Pelosi passed the buck to John Conyers to handle it. He's the Judiciary Committee chair and is overseeing this. At today's hearing, he has only allowed testimony and a modified review the alleged crimes of what he calls the Imperial Presidency of George W. Bush.


Conyers has been described as the man with the power to pull the trigger on impeachment but won't, since Congress isn't allowed to vote on it. I'm not sure if this was fully his decision since media coverage is so skimpy. That link has a solid overview of his history. He started off his career as a firebrand for everyone's rights but may end it as the man who killed any chance of impeaching a president who (you fill in the many blanks).

As it stands, Congress has no muscle today and will not be able to vote on impeachment this political session, which ends in a week or two. I suspect this suits them all fine, since nearly all are complicit in not opposing the war and all the horrors associated with it when they could have and funding it further when they didn't have to.

Then they'll go on their August vacations.

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Addendum, Post-Hearing, 8 PM

The applause for Dennis Kucinich when he entered the room felt good. From the Democrats, he got a hero's welcome. Previous to the hearing, he said,

"Our Constitution is being destroyed. We are losing our nation to a war based on lies. I am determined to get this bill to committee for a hearing... The President has conducted the affairs of the nation in a manner which cries out for justice and it is the Constitutional obligation of Congress to check his wanton abuses of U.S. and international law."

Kucinich, courageous as ever, re-iterated this but also tied the trillions of dollars spent on the war to our economy crashing and burning.

John Conyers, who began the hearing and led it, appeared as though he slept poorly the night before. He explained that it technically it "wasn't an impeachment hearing, to the regret of many."

This suggests that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the power to keep the issue off the table and succeeded. If she was in the audience, I didn't see her.

Speaking of her power, next week Pelosi will kick off her book tour, "Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters."


Thanks to her, Bush & Co., Congress doesn't even have power to do a real impeachment hearing on the alleged high crimes or to vote him out of office. So why is Pelosi pedaling a fairytale that America's daughters could ever have power?

Don't answer; it's a rhetorical question.

Anyway, I concluded that Conyers deeply wants to protect rights of all citizens and our Constitution, but was hand-tied. If he wasn't, he gave this impression. He said Congress has the responsibility to examine the president's record and whether he has overstepped his authority, even if impeachment is apparently off the table.

This was great, if it's true that Conyers did what he could to not sell us out. It runs contrary to one article linked higher in this post which states he could have forced a vote. That wasn't the impression I got watching the hearing. Amazingly, I can't find much of anything about how much power he did or didn't have, beyond Pelosi stating 'it's off the table.' This is because all the mainstream media is ducking the event.

Numerous congresspersons spoke, generally alternating between a Democrat and a Republican. The GOP congressmen said they saw no evidence of wrong-doing by the President. Lamar Smith (R), the first red party congressman to speak, said the hearing was a waste of time since nothing would come it, and compared the hearing to "an anger management class."

It's after 6PM now and the news has ignored the hell of this story of historical proportions that some of our elected officials really tried.

Here are a couple of quotes I managed to scribble down from this morning's hearing that I liked. Wish I had more, these folks were good.

Robert Wexler, (D) Florida: "Faced with this litany of wrongful actions, I am convinced that the most appropriate response to this unprecedented behavior is to hold hearings for impeachment."

Brad Miller, (D) North Carolina: "Democracy dies behind closed doors."

Keith Ellison, (D) Minnesota: "Power unused is lost."

'Nuff said. Time to listen to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's take on it.

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