Kucinich threatens 60 impeachment articles if Judiciary doesn’t act
Rep. Dennis Kucinich warned the House Judiciary Committee that it would be wise not to ignore the 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush last week. If the committee does not act within a month, he plans to introduce even more articles.
The Ohio Democrat and former presidential candidate tells the Washington Post’s Sleuth blog that he’s not giving up his fight to kick Bush out of the White House.
Kucinich tells us he’s giving the House Judiciary Committee 30 days to act on his resolution proposing 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush or else he’ll raise even more hell on the House floor. Thirty-five articles was just the tip of the iceberg. If Judiciary does nothing, he’ll go back to the House floor next month armed with nearly twice as many articles.
“The minute the leadership said ‘this is dead on arrival’ I said that I hope they believe in life after death; because I’m coming back with it,” Kucinich vowed in an interview with the Sleuth this week. “It’s not gonna die. Because I’ll come back with more articles. Not 35, but perhaps 60 articles.”
Elected on a platform of holding the president accountable, the newly Democratic Congress has nonetheless been unwilling to even consider impeachment. A Kucinich-sponsored measure to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney was referred to the Judiciary Committee last November; the Committee has done nothing with it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has declared impeachment “off the table,” and Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has been unwilling to cross her. House Democrats simply do not believe they have enough votes to actually impeach Bush or Cheney, and they are unwilling to dwell on the issue with just a few months left in the current administrations’ term.
Kucinich told the Sleuth that he plans to sit down with Conyers this week to try to convince the chairman to consider at least one article of impeachment, which accused Bush for waging a war “based on lies.”
For Kucinich, impeachment is more than simply a political windmill at which to tilt, he says. It’s about preserving the sanctity of the republic’s founding document.
“What we’re witnessing here,” he says, “is the not-so-slow-moving destruction of our Constitution.”