Kucinich’s Impeachment Measure Gains Co-Sponsor, But Democrats Call it a ‘Distraction’

By Jason Leopold, The Public Record

U.S. Rep Robert Wexler, (D-Fla.), said Tuesday he will co-sponsor a resolution introduced Monday night by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush for lying to Congress and the public to win support for an invasion of Iraq five years ago.

"President Bush deliberately created a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people and the charges detailed in this impeachment resolution indicate an unprecedented abuse of executive power," Wexler said in a prepared statement. "A decision by Congress to pursue impeachment is not an option, it is a sworn duty. It is time for Congress to stand up and defend the Constitution against the blatant violations and illegalities of this Administration. Our Founding Fathers bestowed upon Congress the power of impeachment, and it is now time that we use it to defend the rule of law from this corrupt Administration."

But Steny Hoyer, the Democratic House Majority Leader, told reporters Tuesday that the 35 articles of impeachment Kucinich read to his colleagues over a four-hour period will be shelved. The House is expected to vote Tuesday to send the impeachment articles to the House Judiciary Committee where it will likely be shelved.

Wexler co-sponsored a separate resolution Kucinich introduced last year that called for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. When the House Judiciary Committee refused to take up the measure Wexler launched a campaign to drum up support for impeachment hearings against Cheney.

Hoyer, like his colleague Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House who has resisted public pressure to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush, said Tuesday that Congress would not seriously consider acting upon Kucinich’s resolution because it would distract Congress from finishing its work on other pressing issues, examples of which he did not cite.

Congress has not considered impeachment because the Democratic leadership believes it will hurt their party's chances of securing the White House in November's hotly contested presidential election between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. Additionally, Democrats said they do not have enough votes to support a move to impeach the president.

However, Democrats would consider initiating impeachment proceedings if the president authorizes a military strike against Iran without first consulting Congress, according to a May 8 letter sent to President Bush by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers.

"Late last year, Senator Joseph Biden stated unequivocally that “the president has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran, and if he does, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, I will move to impeach” the president.

"We agree with Senator Biden, and it is our view that if you do not obtain the constitutionally required congressional authorization before launching preemptive military strikes against Iran or any other nation, impeachment proceedings should be pursued, Conyers' letter says.

Kucinich said Monday night as he read the articles of impeachment on the House floor that President Bush misled "the American people and members of Congress to believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction so as to manufacture a false case for war."

"President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office," Kucinich said. "In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and to the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power..."

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence agreed. Last week, the committee released a long-awaited report on prewar Iraq intelligence that concluded President Bush and Vice President Cheney knowingly lied to the public and to Congress about Iraq's links to al-Qaeda and the threat the country posed to the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11.

That would be an impeachable offense, according to former Nixon counsel John Dean.

"To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," Dean wrote in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com.

"Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.

Moreover, the move to impeach President Bush comes on the heels of a letter signed by 56 House Democrats Friday that was sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling for the appointment a special counsel to investigate whether President Bush and other White House officials violated the War Crimes Act when they authorized brutal interrogation methods against detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility.

The letter says the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted an independent investigation of interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay and “documented several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball.”

"This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law," the letter to Mukasey says. “We believe that these serious and significant revelations warrant an immediate investigation to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and other U.S. and international laws.”