Rep. Dennis Kucinich's single impeachment article will get a committee hearing — but not on removing President Bush from office.

The House on Tuesday voted 238-180 to send his article of impeachment — for Bush's reasoning for taking the country to war in Iraq — to the Judiciary Committee, which buried Kucinich's previous effort.

This time, the panel will open hearings. But House Democratic leaders emphatically said the proceedings will not be about Bush's impeachment, a first step in the Constitution's process of a removing a president from office.

Instead, the panel will conduct an election-year review — possibly televised — of anything Democrats consider to be Bush's abuse of power. Kucinich, D-Ohio, is likely to testify. But so will several scholars and administration critics, Democrats said.

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June 17, 2007

Speaker Pelosi's two-prong plan was: to reform government - and impeachment was off the table.
****SKIP****
Why would the Speaker of the House of Representatives ever announce that "impeachment is off the table"? By making this statement, the Honorable Representative from the 8th District of San Francisco, California has torn Article II, Section 4 out of our Constitution - set it on fire - and thrown it in a trash can. That is treason, and treason is an impeachable offense. We already have one branch of government trashing the Constitution - we don't need another one. Impeachment is the only Constitutional tool we have to remove "all civil Officers of the United States" from office - not just Presidents and Vice-presidents

As we witness not just Republicans, but also Democrats in Congress, acting repeatedly to immunize executive branch lawbreaking and to obstruct investigations, it’s vital to keep that fact in mind. With regard to illegal Bush programs of torture and eavesdropping, key Congressional Democrats were contemporaneously briefed on what the administration was doing (albeit, in fairness, often in unspecific ways). The fact that they did nothing to stop that illegality, and often explicitly approved of it, obviously incentivizes them to block any investigations or judicial proceedings into those illegal programs.

In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:

Four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

The yellowcake removed from Iraq - which was not the same yellowcake that President George W. Bush claimed, in a now discredited section of his 2003 State of the Union address, that Saddam was trying to purchase in Africa - could be used in an early stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. Only after intensive processing would it become low-enriched uranium, which could fuel reactors producing power. Highly enriched uranium can be used in nuclear bombs.

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