Tonight a smart and determined group of impeachment activists gathered in front of the Yale Club of New York City to urge Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to hold impeachment hearings. Nadler was scheduled to speak at the annual dinner for Citizen Action of New York, one of New York's leading progressive organizations, which does outstanding work on education, health care, and other important issues.
Nadler chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, so Dennis Kucinich's H.Res. 333 (recently revised as H.Res. 799) is before his committee, which makes him a key player on impeachment.
I stood with the impeachment activists for a while before the event began, and the response from passers-by was mostly positive, although midtown Manhattan is not a place to encourage honking! I bought a ticket to the dinner inside hoping to speak with Nadler on behalf of the activists outside. While Nadler arrived near the end, I did get to spend a few minutes discussing impeachment with him, although we kept getting interrupted by other guests.
I have lobbied Nadler on impeachment several times, so I did not take him by surprise and he greeted me with a friendly smile, and we covered much of the same ground. "When are you going to schedule hearings on impeachment?" I began, aiming right for the bottom line. "As a subcommittee chairman I can't make that decision, it's up to Chairman Conyers," he replied.
"Besides it's a bad idea," he said. "Why?" I asked. "It would suck all the oxygen out of Congress, and we wouldn't get anything else done." I suppressed the obvious snarky answer that they weren't getting anything else done anyway, and took a different tack: "But it's just one subcommittee, how can that suck all the oxygen out of Congress?" "You know how the media would jump on it," he replied. I wanted to say, "Yes and that's good because the American people would support the impeachment effort," but someone else pulled him aside.
A few minutes later I caught him again. "What would we hold hearings on?" he asked. "Valerie Plame!" I replied. "So we'd call 4 witnesses for our side, and they'd call 1 for their side, and that would be that." "No, then you drill down on the evidence and build the case," I replied. "You have the whole court record to work with!" And someone else grabbed him.
I waited and gave it one more try. "Impeachment can never work, it wasn't designed for a two-party system, that's why we've never removed a President" he said. "So then we should tear up the Constitution?" I asked. "No we need a new Special Prosecutor law that would focus on truly impeachable offenses like abuse of power." "But we just got rid of the Special Prosecutor law because of Ken Starr," I said. "We can write a better law," he said. Yeah sure in 5 or 10 years, I thought to myself as someone else grabbed him.
We touched on a few other points along the way, like how the Democrats let the neocons get away with their Iran-Contra crimes in the late 80's, which allowed them to come back to power with Bush in 2000. But there was no argument I could offer that would make a dent. "You're not going to change my mind," he said nicely because we're almost becoming friends.
So there it stands, just as it did before. Nadler recognizes all of the crimes the Bush Administration is committing, but can't (because of Conyers) and won't (because of the two-party system and the rightwing-controlled media) hold impeachment hearings to stop them.
So what are we to do, those millions of us who care about the Constitution and the quiet rise of Fascism? Keep calling, keep writing, keep leafleting, keeping protesting, and keep lobbying until we somehow get the idea across to our Representatives that we are in a state of emergency that ordinary hearings and legislation cannot fix. "The Founding Fathers put impeachment in the Constitution just for Presidential abuses like these," Nadler said at one point. He understands the problem, as do all the other Democrats - they just need millions of Americans to demand that they act.
