Impeach Cheney
Slate
The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.
By Bruce Fein
Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president’s insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney’s multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.
There’s new life in the accountability movement! The People v Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way (Chelsea Green) has just been published. Author Charlotte Dennett will be in Cambridge January 20 at the Harvard Bookstore at 7 pm to discuss it and the following day, January 21, at 7 p.m. in New York City at the 92nd St Y. Vincent Bulgiosi is flying all the way from the west coast and will join Naomi Wolf in helping her launch the book on the 21st.