Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich motioned to impeach Cheney today. Cheney, not Bush, he explained, because “if we were to start with the president and pursue articles of impeachment, Mr. Cheney would then become president…. you would then have to go through the constitutional agony of impeaching two presidents consecutively.”
This is a one-man move, since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said impeachment is off the table. The party has strongly denied that it would ever impeach, in order to prevent the possibility from mobilizing the Republican base. Even though the motion is dead in the water, it’s a powerful political statement.
Since Kucinich is putting himself in the limelight for another presidential run here, it’s worth mentioning that he is not the liberal gold standard his radical supporters think. As Katha Pollitt pointed out, he has actually voted pro-life at every opportunity.
Kucinich said the imperative for impeachment is to prevent Cheney from leading us to war with Iran. Maybe this is too optimistic, but at this point, Congress has got to be too Democratic and too jaded to fall for that one again. If not, well, what’s the use in cutting off the head of the hydra?
In a review of the impeachment lit, Tim Dickinson wrote last fall, “There’s little doubt that, both legally and morally, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have earned an early retirement. Hell, the administration has even lost the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., who said of Bush in late July: ‘If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced, it would be expected that he would retire or resign.’ ” …..[But] I’m confident the American people would far prefer a porn star or a midget, fairly elected—or, for that matter, two more years of the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush—than to see the White House change hands in what could only be described as an administrative coup.” Read on….
