05/22/07 Forum Urges All To Work To Impeach Bush
Forum Urges All To Work To Impeach Bush
The Capital Times
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Samara Kalk Derby The Capital Times
Democratic Party leaders have taken no steps to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, so a group of political activists is bringing the urgency of impeachment to the people.
National and local voices for impeachment led a town hall meeting Monday evening at the Memorial Union.
Debra Sweet, a Madison native and national director of World Can't Wait, a New York-based group promoting impeachment, said the country needs to break out of politics as usual.
"Impeachment is not exactly politics as usual. Many, many people across this country feel utterly locked out about how to change anything right now in terms of the political process," she told about 250 people in Great Hall.
Not only did Bush get the country into an illegitimate and illegal war in Iraq, she said, but he violated FISA - the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - which requires a warrant be issued before surveillance is conducted.
"Everyone in Congress knows that Bush openly violated the FISA law. He told us that he violated it. These are impeachable offenses. There is no question about that. The political will for impeachment can only come from one place - the people," Sweet said.
The articles of impeachment, she said, can be written overnight on a cocktail napkin.
"What's lacking is the political will," she said, noting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the extraordinary step six months ago of saying that impeachment is off the table.
John Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times and author of the book "The Genius of Impeachment," traveled around Vermont talking about impeachment with the country's most famous war protester, Cindy Sheehan. There are now 41 towns in Vermont that voted to impeach the president.
In April, Vermont state senators voted to call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, saying their actions have raised "serious questions of constitutionality." The nonbinding resolution is believed to be the first in the country.
Nichols said he is disappointed that Wisconsin hasn't followed suit.
"Why hasn't Madison, Wisconsin, the radical hotbed of America, blah, blah, blah, voted to impeach the president and vice president of the United States?" he asked, encouraging the audience to pressure the Madison City Council to do just that.
"Let's get this on the City Council's agenda and let's get it done," he said.
Nichols said he worries about the president and vice president leading the country into a war with Iran, "a war that can only end in nuclear holocaust."
While the Congress of the United States debates benchmarks and timelines, Nichols gave his own timelines: "Every 10 minutes an Iraqi dies in this war.
Every 10 hours an American dies in this war. Every 10 days $2 billion are taken out of the U.S. Treasury and poured into the pockets of Halliburton and the other war criminals of this conflict. That is the timeline we should be discussing," he said, drawing a standing ovation.
"The failure to impeach damns this country to a darker future," Nichols said.
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Monday, Democracy for America, a pressure group within the Democratic Party, launched www.impeachgonzales.org, a national Web site collecting petitions to pressure Congress to impeach Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In the first hour that it was up, more than 20,000 people signed the petition.
Organizers believe that by the end of the week they will have more than a million signatures, and they are ready to go to Congress and force the issue, Nichols said.
"This is no longer the fringe. This is the core of the Democratic Party. ... The fact is, impeachment is coming to the mainstream and it is coming just in time," he said.
David Swanson, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, a grass-roots coalition pushing for impeachment, and a part-time consultant for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, showed up at the forum wearing a T-shirt that said "Impeach Bush & Cheney."
A successful movement requires spreading the word in fun and creative ways "that make the dull-sounding work of restoring our Constitution" enjoyable and productive, Swanson said.
"Based on the few polls that we have, we know that those of us who want impeachment are a majority or very close to it," he said. "That should give us all the confidence we need to make impeachment happen."
A January Zogby poll commissioned by Swanson's group showed that Americans, by a margin of 52 to 43 percent, want Congress to consider impeaching Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval.
But it's not enough to be a majority - it also has to feel like a majority, he said. One of the ways to do that is to wear a T-shirt like Swanson's everywhere you go, he said, adding that the shirts are available on the Web site www.impeach07.org.
"I've been wearing the shirts for two years and I can count on one hand the negative comments I've had," he said, noting that some of those encounters led to productive conversations. On the other hand, he has had thousands of positive comments, compliments and shows of support.
"If we push hard enough, we can make impeachment happen," Swanson said.
According to costofwar.com, the people of Wisconsin have spent $6.8 billion on the occupation of Iraq, he said. Instead, the state could have provided 330,744 students with four-year scholarships to public universities, according to the Web site.
When Swanson asked if there were any college students in the room, four hands went up. "We need to get college students in this room," he said.
Looking into the crowd, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed Garvey, the fourth of the evening's speakers, said he saw people who believe they can bring about change.
"I am sick and tired of people telling me that there are more important issues than the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. What the hell are they?" he said.
Buzz Davis of the Wisconsin Impeachment/Bring Our Troops Home Coalition, who organized the forum, said his group has collected more than 5,000 names on impeachment petitions for Bush, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for "high crimes and misdemeanors."
The event will be broadcast at 7 p.m. Thursday on WYOU/Cable Channel 4.
E-mail: skalk@madison.com