Rep. Pelosi: Impeachment Is Off the Table

Do you think she oughtta worry about the Dems gaining the majority first and worry about IF she'll become Speaker and which suite she'll occupy later?
If they don't win, this is a prime example why.
As did John Kerry, they just assume they'll win.

 

CBS was assuming they would win, thus the 60 Minutes story.
Of course network news is merely an arm of the Democratic Party, etc., etc.

 

Come on, Ragu. Give me an honest read here. I compared the impeachment process under Tip O'Neill to a (hypothetical) one under Speaker Pelosi. O'Neill turned off at least three attempts to impeach Nixon -- including one over the secret bombing of Cambodia -- because the political climate wasn't right and/or the evidence was not (yet) there. But he never, ever, took it off the table, thereby keeping all his options open in the future.
Impeachment should never be the first club out of the bag. (The Republicans in the 1990's notwithstanding). However, after seven years of a reckless, secretive, arguably criminal administration run amuck, the rejuvenation of congressional oversight is a necessity. Start, as I've said, with war profiteering. See where it leads. To me, this is Pelosi saying not merely "no impeachment ever," but "no messy investigations" either. That's bad.

 

President is a war criminal.

He must be dealt with.

 

Nancy Pelosi is NOT a lead-pipe cinch to become Speaker. There are quite a few Democrats in the House displeased with her handling of issues landing in her lap. She might yet be challenged by Steny Hoyer (the House Democratic whip), who has stated so far he won't do so but could be persuaded. Another possibility is James Clyburn (who would become the first African-American speaker). Murtha will not challenge Pelosi; he would become Defense Subcommittee chairman (cha-CHING!) and besides, he and Pelosi are friends.

Nancy screwed up by not keeping her powder dry, a la O'Neill. If House Dems are still thirsting for presidential blood after the election, her words may come back to haunt her.

 

As if it isn't already.

The stragegy should be to find something to hang on Cheney first, dispose of him, THEN go for Shrubby.

 

I said it on another thread and I'll say it here: the more you turn the next two years into a referendum on the last six, instead of looking forward, the more likely you are to hand the keys to Congress back over in 2008.

 

Yes, let's paralyze the country for two years while pursuing some agenda-driven bullshit.

Brilliant.

 

By all means, if there have been crimes over the past seven years, let's forget about them. If there has been gross incompetence, mismanagement and fraud, let's pretend it all never happened and enter into a glowing era of bipartisan governance with the people who profited from it. Let's all wander through the wreckage wondering how it all piled up so high.
You can legislate and invesitgate and govern at the same time. Honest. We used to be smart that way.

 

The post D_B didn't want you to see:

“Impeachment is off the table,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who would likely be Speaker of the House if Democrats win, on 60 Minutes Sunday.

“And that’s a pledge?” asked CBS’s Lesley Stahl.

“Well, it’s a pledge in the — yes, I mean, it’s a pledge,” Pelosi said. “Of course it is. It is a waste of time.”

Pelosi’s statement reflects the belief of many Democratic strategists that impeaching the president would have disastrous political consequences for the party. It is conventional wisdom among insiders in both parties that the Clinton impeachment in 1998-1999 was an enormous mistake for Republicans. But after impeaching Clinton, the GOP went on to win control of the House and Senate three more times (so far) and of the White House twice (so far). Impeachment did not exactly cast the party into the political wilderness.

In any event, that kind of definitive, no-impeachment rhetoric is not coming from (potential House Judiciary Committee Chairman) John Conyers. Instead, Conyers has spent the last several years carefully assembling a case for removing the president. His most recent effort was a 350-page report, released in August, entitled, “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance.” The report never mentioned the word “impeachment,” but Conyers made it clear that he believes the president has committed several impeachable offenses.

“Approximately 26 laws and regulations may have been violated by this administration’s misconduct,” Conyers wrote on the DailyKos and Huffington Post websites the day the report was released. “The report…compiles the accumulated evidence that the Bush administration has thumbed its nose at our nation’s laws, and the Constitution itself.”

Conyers’s accusations were quite specific. On the war in Iraq, for example, he accused Bush of violating four laws: Committing a Fraud Against the United States (18 U.S.C. 371); Making False Statements to Congress (18 U.S.C. 1001); War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148); and Misuse of Government Funds (31 U.S.C. 1301).

The fraud committed by the president, Conyers argued, was making the decision to go to war in Iraq before asking Congress for the authority to do so. (The reason for that, Conyers says, was that the president was “avenging [his] father and working with the neo-cons.”) The false statements, according to Conyers, include the president’s mention, in the 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Africa. And the violations of the War Powers Resolution and Misuse of Government Funds came when the president moved some military assets to the Gulf region before Congress voted to authorize the war.

Conyers also alleged that the president has broken three other laws, Anti-Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. 2340-40A), The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441), and Material Witness (18 U.S.C. 3144), with his policies on the treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror. And then, Conyers alleged that the president broke four more laws, Obstructing Congress (18 U.S.C. 1505), Whistleblower Protection (5 U.S.C. 2302), The Lloyd-LaFollette Act (5 U.S.C. 7211), Retaliating against Witnesses (18 U.S.C. 1513), in the Valerie Plame/CIA leak affair. Finally, Conyers alleged the president broke five more laws, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.), National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. chapter 15), Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 222), Stored Communications Act of 1986 (18 U.S.C. 2702), and Pen Registers or Trap and Trace Devices (18 U.S.C. 3121), in the NSA warrantless-wiretap matter.

Reading the report, it seems safe to say that Conyers is not doing all that work on a lark; he quite seriously believes George W. Bush has broken a slew of laws. And any one of Conyers’ specific accusations might serve as the basis for an impeachment resolution. In fact, rather than ask whether Conyers might move to impeach the president if Democrats win in November, it seems more reasonable to ask how Conyers could not move to impeach the president, given the long bill of particulars he has compiled.

At the very least, Conyers’s well-laid groundwork points to a potential conflict between him and Pelosi. She might say impeachment is off the table if Democrats are elected, but we haven’t heard any such declaration from Conyers himself. And what would he say? After all, impeachment is something he’s had in mind for a very long time.

— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTc0NWYwOTlhMTFmNjBjN2MwZmUzNWIzY2MwMzhlYjM=

 

And, bat, I think York is ginning up the base here. Conyers can't do anything unless the leadership gives him the OK. (And that's leaving aside the canard that the Clinton impeachment hurt the R's. It held down what should have been legislative gains in the '98 midterms, but it did nothing to prevent their expanding their majorities in '00 and '02.) Again, the Tip Precedent holds -- O'Neill kept Peter Rodino on a short leash until the evidence was absolutely overwhelming, and the political ducks -- namely, three moderate GOP reps -- in a row.

 

Impeach Bush? For what?
Lying?
Trampling the Constitution?
Allowing his cronies to profiteer from a war?
Coverups?

Those are hardly impeachable offenses. Sounds like politics as usual.

Carry on.