Thursday, June 08, 2006

Impeachment Fever

Catch it!

2 Comments:

Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I hadda go look it up, but it works like this:

It takes only a majority of the House to impeach (indict, really) a president. But it takes 2/3 of the Senate to convict him, that is, remove him from office.

A Democrat majority after November's elections might pull off the first in the House, tho I sorta doubt the will is there.

A conviction in the Senate is, I think, impossible.

The strange thing about Bill Clinton is that altho he was only the second American president to be impeached, a move that to our perception was historically momentous, it's done little to harm his reputation. It's a wart on his record, perhaps, but less than a decade later, it's a footnote rather than a headline.

The trivialization of the impeachment process by the GOP has removed any importance or menace that impeachment once had.

As a result, impeachment's been lowered to the standard of a parliamentary vote of no confidence, which altho a shot across the bow, in the end is just so much blather.

(I subscribe to Harper's, BTW, to keep an eye on you guys and also, in between the Bush-bashing, it's a splendid magazine. Lewis Latham, the organizer of the impeachmant symposium, its [at last!] soon to be ex-editor, has sullied a great tradition. I can handle almost any amount of philosophical leftism, but such squalid partisanship is beneath the dignity of the most influential journal of letters in American history.)

12:09 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Yeah, I do worry that the GOP devalued impeachment...I sometimes wonder if that was their plan...now they can get away with anything they want...

Talk about sullying a great tradition...the current batch of criminals and kooks in the GOP should make your blood boil, man! The party of Lincoln reduced to GWB and Tom DeLay! Unfettered presidential power, systematized corruption, contempt for democracy...

Jeez, man, if I were a Republican I'd be marching on DC with pitchforks and torches...

7:58 AM  

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