I was reading
this article in the Guardian and it prompted me to write the following letter to my congresswoman,
Nancy Pelosi, House Minoritly “Leader.”
Impeachment is more important than the fall election. Justice must be served if our laws are to have any meaning. Our President thumbs his nose repeatedly at the enacted laws of congress. How can you consider allowing this to stand? Honestly, I am ashamed that you have not yet publicly supported impeachment. More people support Bush’s impeachment than did Clinton’s, yet our congress does not reflect this. You appear to be more concerned with the balance of power than justice. You are misguided, as the balance of power will follow those that deliver justice. The constitution does not make this an optional responsibility of congress. “The congress shall impeach…” Now do it or we will send Gavin Newsom in there to replace you. He has demonstrated that he will take great risk to stand up for what he believes is right. The Republicans displayed no such fear in impeaching Clinton and look where they ended up.
To be fair though, Congress is full of people who have been making laws that ignore the Constitution for five decades or longer. So let’s also open a dialogue on impeaching ever member of Congress if we’re going to have one on impeaching Bush. Let’s have a mass referundum where Americans are given the opportunity to throw everyone out at the same time and start over…but let’s do it the way we always have, on election day.
Maybe if we could get more than 30% of adults to give a shit, we’d pick better leaders?
Congress makes laws, the Judicial branch decides if they’re constitutional, and the executive branch sees that they are followed. That’s how it works. So congress can pass laws that are unconstitutional, that’s included in the system of checks and balances. Bush ordering the NSA to do data-mining on Americans is in direct violation of a law enacted by congress the last time a president something like that. They didn’t impeach the previous president for it; if they had, perhaps Bush would’ve thought twice about breaking the law.
The problem is this is not democracy. Bush has removed this decision from the democratic process. Are we so afraid of “terrorists” that we are willing to allow our government access to everything we say or do and to use their best judgement to decide if those actions qualify us as a “terrorist” or not and are we also willing to give up the right to dissent against this, or even know that it’s happening? Congress considered the issue and passed a law. Bush decided they weren’t afraid enough of what the terrorist could do to us, so he needed to just ignore the law and do what he wanted to do. Well, if he felt that strongly about it then impeachment is a small price to pay for the safety of the American people, right? And really, this is only one of the many laws he is accused of breaking. Ditto for torturing people.