Vermont Puts Impeachment on the Table
John Nichols reports in The Nation today that he and Cindy Sheehan are in Vermont this weekend, speaking in nearly a dozen towns about why they think the president and vice president should be impeached -- and the essential role that Vermonters are playing in the process.
It was Thomas Jefferson who observed more than two hundred years ago that, "Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic."
It was Jefferson, as well, who asked of those who would inherit that republic: "But will they keep it?"
The answer to that question, for this particular moment in history, will come from the Vermont town meetings that debate calls for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney next Tuesday. Last year, seven towns voted to impeach. This year, the numbers will multiply dramatically -- and town meetings in the neighboring states of New Hampshire and Massachusetts are taking it up, as well, this spring.
But, as Americans in towns and cities across this great country despair at the determination of their president to surge the country deeper into the quagmire that is Iraq, and react with horror at courtroom revelations about the manner in which their vice president has used his office to manage attacks on the reputations and livelihoods of an administration critic and his spouse, Vermont can signal to the nation that there is an appropriate response to the crisis.
The Constitution does not belong to the politicians. It belongs to all of us. And the medicines it prescribes for the ailments of the body politic are ours to administer.
Jefferson argued that all power must ultimately rest with the people, believing that citizens at the grassroots would always be better suited than politicians in Washington to recognize the point at which friends of the republic must defend its democratic aspirations and the rule of law that underpins them. "It behooves our citizens to be on their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in themselves," the author of the Declaration of Independence explained. "We are able to preserve our self-government if we will but think so."
If the Vermont legislature responds to the message from the voters by conveying to Congress articles of impeachment, as several legislators have suggested it should, the struggle to hold the president and vice president to account will have been advanced. If Vermont's representative in the U.S. House, Peter Welch (news, bio, voting record), chooses to so respond, he can introduce articles of impeachment incorporating language from the resolutions adopted at Vermont's town meetings.
No less an American than James Madison said, after assuring that the Constitution would include a broad authority to sanction members of the executive branch, observed that "... it may, perhaps, on some occasion, be found necessary to impeach the President himself..."
That occasion, according to John Nichols, is now.
March Impeachment Watch, updated 3/3/07, may be found here.
More soon,
Ticia
