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35 Articles of Impeachment Introduced Against Bush
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 10, 2008 06:52 PM
from the high-crimes-and-misdemeanors dept.
from the high-crimes-and-misdemeanors dept.
vsync64 writes "Last night, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) spent 4 hours reading into the Congressional Record 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. Interestingly, those articles (63-page PDF via Coral CDN) include not just complaints about signing statements and the war in Iraq, but also charges that the President "Sp[ied] on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment,' 'Direct[ed] Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens,' and 'Tamper[ed] with Free and Fair Elections.' These are issues near and dear to the hearts of many here, so it's worth discussing. What little mainstream media coverage there is tends to be brief (USA Today, CBS News, UPI, AP, Reuters)." The (Democratic) House leadership has said that the idea of impeachment is "off the table." The Judiciary Committee has not acted on articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney introduced by Kucinich a year ago.
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Resolution To Impeach VP Cheney Submitted 1202 comments
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has submitted a resolution, HR 333, to impeach VP Dick Cheney on charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The charges were submitted on 24 April 2007. Congressman Kucinich has posted his supporting documents online, including a brief summary of the impeachment procedure (PDF), a synopsis (PDF), and the full text (PDF) of the impeachment resolution.
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History will do more to condemn Bush (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, the Democrats are looking to rout the Republicans in November at least in the Senate and House(President is still a bit up in the air), doing something showboating like this can only benefit the Republicans.
Re:History will do more to condemn Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:History will do more to condemn Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
"Worst" in the sense of damaging the country more than helping it, and generally failing to uphold his responsibilities as well as failing to meet anything close to his stated goals in his largest presidential decision. But yes, he was certainly an effective leader, and he accomplished a great many things for his party, as well as running a very tight ship in terms of controlling Congress and the media. or, as Scott McClellan would put it, he was in perpetual campaign mode, and at that he was very successful. But perpetual campaign mode is not about success in substance, it's about success in contemporary perception.
Substance is what history will judge his term on, and barring any major changes in the Middle East, it's unlikely to be kind.
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Sex vs. Violence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sex vs. Violence (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sex vs. Violence (Score:5, Informative)
Correction. "Impeached a president because a lying about a BJ". Yes, Bill was impeached. Look it up.
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The very best thing about this story... (Score:5, Funny)
Kucinich... (Score:5, Funny)
nobody in congress seriously wants to impeach (Score:5, Interesting)
BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions (Score:5, Informative)
On a related note...
A BBC investigation estimates [bbc.co.uk] that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.
(more [bbc.co.uk])
Re:...Brought to you by Carl's Jr. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:...Brought to you by Carl's Jr. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now there needs just needs to be a Constitutional Amendment which requires the ENTIRE US TAX CODE to be read into the Congressional Record every single year for it to be legally binding! Of course, that would either require CSPAN to get another satellite or for the tax code to be shortened into the flat tax...
Then again, I was under the impression that "earmarks" were not required to be read into the record either? Whoops... confusing the Congressional Record's purpose with that of Official Congressional Business as Usual...
What? What was its purpose again?
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Re:...Brought to you by Carl's Jr. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:...Brought to you by Carl's Jr. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You don't seem to understand the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to complain about wasting time in Congress, look up which party has done more filibustering in recent years.
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Re:You don't seem to understand the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whichever party is in the minority. Right now that would be the Republicans; a few years ago it was the Democrats. The majority party doesn't filibuster; they simply don't let legislation they want to die get out of committee.
Not sure exactly what your point is though; many people would argue that filibustering is an important tactic to prevent a very narrowly divided Senate from railroading the minority party. I'd hardly call that a waste of time.
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Re:You don't seem to understand the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You don't seem to understand the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
If we were to allow Congressman Kucinich ten minutes of airtime for every legally questionable act by the Bush administration, he would still have many hours of airtime left today. Or how about we do it one to one? One minute of airtime for every minute used up in White House press briefings by their fake journalist [wikipedia.org]?
Four hours is a drop in the bucket. My only regret is that Dubya didn't have to stand in a stress position and listen to all of it and then recite it back.
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Re:You don't seem to understand the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
That 4-hour rant would be much more interesting if it described the seedy underbelly of the regime as a whole, to include Cheney, Rove, big Oil's insane profits, the conflict-of-interest contracts involving retired-military execs now working for the military industrial complex, the 9/11 snafu, the FBI/NSA/CIA/etc's blatantly illegal honeymoons with the major telecoms, and finally, a special thanks to Diebold for making it happen.
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Re:Silliness (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Silliness (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
They never would have been caught because no one would have CARED.
There would not be the initial scrutiny and there would not be the continued witch hunt and bullying of witnesses.
The "Law and Order" tactics would never have come up because
under normal circumstances NO ONE would view it as a useful
expenditure of the effort.
The "crime" would never have come to light to begin with.
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Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
Clinton was asked if he had sexual relations with Lewinsky.
He asked the judge to define "sexual relations". The *judge* told him sexual relations means intercourse.
Now, you might have a different definition, but unless you are going to try to convince us that he had intercourse with Lewinsky, then you must admit that he did not commit perjury.
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Informative)
In all of that, not a single mention of the alternatives to oil. Not a single mention of nuclear power. Not a single mention of wind power. Not a single mention of solar power.
But the part that gave you away, was the part about "China is drilling off the shore of Florida, that should be OUR OIL". Because, you have somehow taken the fact that the straights of florida are 90 miles wide, and HALF of them are legally within the territoy of Cuba. 45 miles is ours, and 45 miles is theirs. Cuba has leased out the dilling rights to a company from China. Whats the problem with that? If the world oil market global as you say it is, then it doesnt really matter who is drilling it, as it will be sold to the person who pays market value for it.
Its not OUR oil, its the oil of a sovereign country that happens to be within 90 miles of our own coastline. It makes me skeptical that you chose to not present that fact in your post.
I know you made a mistake in typing out the first can(t) in the following sentence, but the humor of saying "If he can handle an interview with Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, then he can't handle being president!" was probably the most amusing Freudian slip Ive seen in a very long while.
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) It will establish a precedent of impeaching presidents who are grossly incompetent and overstep the constitutional limits on their power. Future presidents will think twice before starting wars on false pretenses or torturing prisoners of war or illegally spying on citizens without warrants. Failing to impeach him would imply that these actions are acceptable, which WILL have an effect on future presidents' actions.
(2) It will show the world that America realizes that we made a huge mistake by electing Dubya twice. Right now, we're the laughing stock of the world (see any opinion poll taken after 2003). This decline in world opinion has real economic and political consequences that, for the most part, haven't been felt yet. Impeaching Bush would help to show the world that America always does the right thing, albeit after exhausting every alternative.
(3) It will remind Americans that impeachments can be used for something other than lying about blowjobs. Sometimes I cynically suspect that Republicans impeached Clinton for lying about his affair because they had the foresight to suspect that one of their own would be in this position today. (No, I don't actually believe this, but it's funny how convenient this sequence of events turned out to be for them...) It's a lot harder to push impeachment proceedings through Congress when the only impeachment anyone alive today remembers is one that centered around a trivial, non-job-performance related non-crime. Impeachments should be about high crimes and gross incompetence related to the duties of the office of the President, and impeaching Bush will help to restore some measure of seriousness to this procedure.
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
no petty mass murderer has ever been responsible for the deaths of so many innocent people.
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Funny)
Bitches don't know about my Stalin.
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Pointless and stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Result: civil war (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Pointless and stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
As the American Freedom Campaign put it in an email to members this morning:
"The founders of our country feared more than anything else the prospect of an executive who put his own power and desires above the Constitution. Congress was given the power of impeachment so that it could remove any president who committed the high crime of violating the Constitution during his (or her) term in office.
A strong case can be made that no president in the history of this country is more deserving of impeachment than George W. Bush. If he is not impeached, the bar for impeachment will have been raised so high that it might as well no longer exist. Future presidents will know that they can violate the Constitution at will, confident in the fact that Congress does not have the courage as an institution to do anything about it.
We cannot allow this to happen."
That's about as simple as it gets. Even if Bush only have seven months left, Congress has to set an example and exert its authority.
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Re:Pointless and stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Congress will do nothing because it will expose their own complicity.
As someone above stated, perhaps next year with a more activist Congress and the Bushies out of power, then maybe some of the truth will start to trickle out. We will probably never know how bad things really got. Thanks for nothing, Congress.
Don't vote for any incumbents unless they spoke out when it was unpopular to do so.
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Disqualification from office (Score:5, Informative)
There's a value beyond the symbolic one. Article I, Section 3 allows the outcome of impeachment and conviction to include "disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States". We've had convicted felons re-hired into the Executive branch before. Impeachment and conviction could remove the risk of something like that happening.
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Re:Pointless and stupid (Score:5, Informative)
They better not... their own rulebook [wikipedia.org] says about the like:
Unless they've got a darn good reason not to move along with this, they've got to deal with it...before anything else, it seems, but I'm not lawyer-shaped.
I'm just glad someone, anyone more like, finally pointed out the emperor has no clothes...and hasn't for a while...
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Re:For the readers from Europe ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:For the readers from Europe ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:For the readers from Europe ... (Score:5, Informative)
1.) One or more Congressmen in the House of Representatives present the Articles of Impeachment for consideration.
2.) The House considers the Articles and says "yea" or "nay"; A yes vote (a simple majority is required) acts like an official indictment against the President. This is the actual "Impeachment" that everyone talks about. A common misunderstanding is that Impeachment means removal from office. That takes place in step three.
3.) If impeached, the Senate acts as the jury in a trial presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. If convicted (this part requires a 2/3ds majority of Senators), the President is then removed from office.
Two Presidents have ever been impeached. Andrew Johnson (succeeded Lincoln after his assassination) and Bill Clinton. Johnson resigned before his Senate trial and Clinton was aquitted. Richard Nixon was never officially impeached, but he resigned after it became clear that not only would be be impeached, but that the Senate would remove him from office.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment#United_States [wikipedia.org] The Wikipedia entry has more info.
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Re:Kucinich should know the law (Score:5, Informative)
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, requires approval from a judge for eavesdropping.
Even if the Attorney General could repeal laws, in this case the Justice Department had decided the program was illegal and Ashcroft refused to sign off on it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051500864.html [washingtonpost.com]
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If *you* knew the law... (Score:5, Insightful)
Article VI
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I have mod points. But I want you to repeat for us your assertion that the Attorney General has the power to issue warrants. Alternately, you may explicitly state your belief that a law may override the Constitution.
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Re:What a Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
And then your signature tells us the irony in your ad hominem for kucinich.
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