Citizen Power

News from CNN today:

“December 16th, 2008
Impeachment panel meets for first time

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois (CNN) — Members of an Illinois House panel met for the first time Tuesday to determine whether there is a basis to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Federal prosecutors accuse Blagojevich of trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat. He was arrested on December 9 on federal corruption charges and has since ignored calls to resign.

The 21-member panel is “not a committee to impeach the governor, but rather to investigate whether or not there exists a basis for the drafting and consideration of an impeachment motion by the full House,” Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, the majority leader and chairwoman of the committee, said.

The proceedings will be fair, Currie emphasized. “Many Illinoisans today, including some of the lawmakers chosen to sit on this committee, have strong feelings about the governor, and the crimes of which he’s been accused.
. . . .
Many members said Tuesday they regretted having to call impeachment proceedings, but described it as necessary.

“It’s unfortunate we’re here,” Rep. Jim Durkin, a Republican, said. “But we have responsibilities.”

It’s interesting to me that the state of Illinois can respond to swiftly to a bad governor and take action to remove him from office. We have had George Bush as a president for 8 long, excruciating years, and Nancy Pelosi and others took impeachment “off the table”. See the sentence at the end of this story and that it ends with “…. we have responsibilities.” How is it that the state of Illinois has more and bigger responsibilities than the United States Congress?

Just how threatening to the world and our U.S. Constitution is Governor Blagojevich? Let’s see . . . not at all. He’s accused of bribery, fraud, and various other white collar crimes that have actually harmed nobody. So why the rush to impeach him? Why, it’s not a rush at all. It’s just what states do when their governor breaks the law. That’s common sense.

It should also be common sense that when a U.S. president breaks the law, he or she is impeached. After all, that’s the law. But instead, our Congress made every type of excuse known to man to not impeach the president, including the excuse that they didn’t want to do it because they were too lazy. That is essentially their argument: they didn’t want to get bogged down, they didn’t want to focus on it, as though they couldn’t do anything else at the same time. Impeachment would have been too high a political price to pay for the Democrats, etc. etc. All weak and none of them valid.

The people of Illinois have strong feelings about their governor breaking the law. Do they also have strong feelings about George W. Bush breaking the law, and if not, why not? Certainly Bush’s crimes are much more severe than their governor’s. And their governor hasn’t ordered any illegal wars, or torture.

When a public official commits felonies, you impeach them if they won’t resign. The state of Illinois is doing it already (today in fact) and yet after years of George W. Bush breaking the law, starting illegal wars, taking away our civil rights, spying on Americans, and more, the Congress just couldn’t get it’s collective shit together enough to start impeachment proceedings against him.

That means that our state governments are far healthier than our federal government. I venture a good guess that no one will prosecute Bush for any crimes after he has left office, even though he has committed universal war crimes and ordered torture. This has greatly weakened our country and the Constitution.

Will we ever have a U.S. Congress who is willing to impeach the president again? My guess is the next one is already working on impeaching Obama, and for no other reason than that Obama is a Democrat. They probably won’t even require that he break the law!