Impeach

This is what impeachment was meant for

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
7/8/07

Back during the Clinton Impeachment fiasco, poll after poll showed that there was very little support for impeachment, and virtually none at all outside of GOP voters. It wasn’t just polls; the 1998 elections gave the Democrats extra seats in Congress – something virtually unheard of for a President’s party in the sixth year of his administration, an upset which led a furious GOP to turn on Newt Gingrich and dump him unceremoniously as Speaker. Further, after two terms of Bill Clinton, the voters were more than happy to stay with a winner, and elected Al Gore by a three million vote margin, only to see the election stolen by a crooked and corrupt Supreme Court.

Impeachment for Bill Clinton was not a popular idea, and rarely got more than 30% support in the polls. Indeed, job approval ratings for Clinton PEAKED the day of the Impeachment vote, soaring to 72%. Clinton’s approval ratings never did drop below 55% at any point after that.

This was despite the endless blare from the right wing echo chamber about how what Clinton did was horrible, and what about our poor children! The contemptible Kenneth Starr made sure there would be plenty of material for the kiddies, lovingly caressing in his report unfounded allegations of analingus and penetration with cigars. It may have been the only erection Kenneth Starr had in the 90s.

The right wing discovered that they couldn’t blandly lie to the American people and expect automatic acceptance. They are still a little disconcerted about that, but characteristically, they came up with the wrong rationale for the lack of public support.

The public didn’t support them because the charges against Clinton weren’t believable, and the only ones that seemed to have any merit – fibbing about getting a blow job – struck most people as, if not actually trivial, certainly not worthy of the political assassination of an impeachment.

Republicans, incapable of recognizing that the public saw through their morally outraged squawks about morality and propriety and spotted the sleazy, cowardly motivations that underlay the pontifications, decided that what went wrong was just that the public just didn’t like impeachments. After all, they lacked public support the both times they tried such a form of assassination. Er, I mean, justice. Yes, justice. How DARE Andrew Johnson fire a member of his cabinet! (It’s a toss-up as to which ginned-up rationale for impeachment was the sillier, really).

Republicans gained what solace they could from it. They even convinced themselves that the public secretly hated Clinton, but that the Republicans just chose the wrong tool to punish him with. Had they censured Clinton, they told one another, they might have been able to impeach and convict him on something else later. Kenneth Starr was bound to find SOMETHING he could throw at Clinton. Starr was the best prosecutor money could buy, after all.

Six years later, Clinton, happily retired, remains one of the most popular public figures in the country and his wife is a rising star in the Senate and a leading candidate for President. And the Republicans are looking at the polls and realizing that not only is public support for Putsch collapsing, but that the entire GOP was beginning a hard slide. Even if the rank and file hadn’t figured it out, the party pols were realizing that the endless think tanks, the Moonie Times, Rush Limbaugh, and the Murdoch and Scaife empires were rapidly losing their effectiveness in molding public opinion.

Still, they assured themselves, there had been just enough in 2004 to get Putsch a second term, and if the 2006 elections didn’t go well, at least they weren’t as bad as some sixth-year elections. (They were careful not to draw comparisons to the last such election, in 1998). The Dems didn’t have a veto-proof majority in either House, and Putsch was there until January 2009. Hadn’t Pelosi said that impeachment was off the table?

Politically, it seemed it was off the table. Polls weren’t being taken to gauge public support for the idea, making it easy to dismiss people who called for Putsch’s impeachment as fringe crackpots. If there didn’t seem to be a broad support for impeachment (which, Republicans would invariably mention, was an unpopular idea anyway), then nobody would bother taking polls. And if it wasn’t important enough to poll, the public assumed that no matter how they as individuals felt, the rest of the country wasn’t thinking impeachment.

As the occupation soured and Katrina exposed the incompetence and contempt the GOP held, Putsch’s approval numbers slid into the 30s, and then into the 20s.

And then, in April, someone commissioned Zogby, the most reputable pollster in the business, to do a poll. The poll found that 40% of people thought impeachment was in order.

Forty percent. That was half again the number who wanted to impeach Clinton after the House hearings, and without all the blasts of propaganda that accompanied the Clinton “investigations.” They couldn’t blame the media for pushing the idea of impeachment because nobody in the media was talking about it.

In fact, the media barely even mentioned the Zogby poll, leaving word of it to circulate on the net. And of course, it did. Outside the insular realms of beltway journalism, which remained convinced the public would never support impeachment, the idea of impeaching this lousy and dishonest president was wildfiring.

Then came the Libby pardon, and a fresh tide of public revulsion. Another polling firm, American Research Group, found that on the topic of impeaching Putsch, the public was evenly split, 45 to 46, with 9 percent undecided. Even more interesting, by a 54-40 margin, the public supported impeaching Cheney.

Suddenly, nobody is pretending impeachment is unpopular or “off the table.” Congress, Democratic and Republican alike, are under increasing pressure to stop Putsch, and stop him now. Most people want the US out of Iraq now. Most people don’t trust the administration, and believe it works against the interests of the American people.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers openly accused Putsch of pardoning Libby to shut him up, and wryly noted that the WH might be more forthcoming in cooperating with the committee with a viable threat of impeachment hanging over its head. Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who introduced a bill to impeach Dick Cheney a couple of months ago to widespread derision, now has eleven co-sponsors, and prospects are good for that number to increase sharply over the coming weeks.

Impeachment is not just possible. It is now likely. But the Democrats are going to have to file impeachment against many high officials in the administration, because as we saw with Scooter Libby, this is a president willing to misuse his power of pardon to obstruct justice in any way he can. And he will. Republicans learned they can pardon people before a trial even starts, a get out of jail free card that places their criminal administration well above American law. And they won’t hesitate to use it.

However, there is a loophole, a situation in which the President may not pardon. He may not do so in cases of impeachment. If articles of impeachment are pending, even if they aren’t going anywhere, Putsch cannot stop the process with the stroke of a pen. The only thing then that can save them, ironically, is to lose the next election so badly that the public will lose interest in the proceedings, at which point the Dems might let at least some of it drop. Maybe.

Republicans may still be subject to other investigations from outside Congress after Putsch leaves office. But we’ll save that for another time.

Dems need to listen to the public, and start impeachment proceedings. Even if they don’t intend to impeach everyone they name, it will be the only way, under this criminal administration and this cowardly amoral president, that justice will be served.