"Each and every one of us must do all that we can to support the major Peace/Impeachment demonstration in Washington, DC on September 15, 2007, backed by more than a million votes for impeachment, and accelerating. The rally will begin at 12 noon at the White House, followed by a march to the Capitol."
--Ramsey Clark

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Published on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 by The Nation

Getting Serious About the “I” Word   by John Nichols

Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough had me on his MSNBC show tonight to talk about impeachment.

...The impetus for the show was Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel’s ongoing discussion of the impeachment prospect —

...Speaking about impeachment on ABC’s “This Week,” Hagel said, “Any president who says ‘I don’t care’ or ‘I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else’ or ‘I don’t care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed’ — if a president really believes that, then there (are) ways to deal with that.”

...A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll — conducted over the weekend — shows that, by close to a 3-to-1 margin, Americans want Congress to issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify in the Gonzales case. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed say the president should drop his claim of executive privilege in this matter, while only 26 percent agree with the reasoning Bush has used to try and block a meaningful inquiry.

If the president wants to get in a fight with Congress over how to read the Constitution, it appears that the people will back Congress. And that backing is what will begin to restore the backbones of House members who, despite Pelosi’s attempts to quiet talk of impeachment, are getting more and more intrigued by the prospect of holding this president to account.

As Hagel says, “This is not a monarchy. There are ways to deal with (executive excess). And I would hope the president understands that.”

If Bush doesn’t recognize this reality now, he soon will.

John Nichols’ new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”