Impeachment by the People
By Howard Zinn February 2007 Issue
The time is right, then, for a national campaign calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
Courage is in short supply in Washington, D.C. The realities of the Iraq War cry out for the overthrow of a government that is criminally responsible for death, mutilation, torture, humiliation, chaos. But all we hear in the nation’s capital, which is the source of those catastrophes, is a whimper from the Democratic Party, muttering and nattering about “unity” and “bipartisanship,” in a situation that calls for bold action to immediately reverse the present course.
These are the Democrats who were brought to power in November by an electorate fed up with the war, furious at the Bush Administration, and counting on the new majority in Congress to represent the voters. But if sanity is to be restored in our national policies, it can only come about by a great popular upheaval, pushing both Republicans and Democrats into compliance with the national will.
The Declaration of Independence, revered as a document but ignored as a guide to action, needs to be read from pulpits and podiums, on street corners and community radio stations throughout the nation. Its words, forgotten for over two centuries, need to become a call to action for the first time since it was read aloud to crowds in the early excited days of the American Revolution: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute new government.”
The “ends” referred to in the Declaration are the equal right of all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” True, no government in the history of the nation has been faithful to those ends. Favors for the rich, neglect of the poor, massive violence in the interest of continental and world expansion—that is the persistent record of our government.
Still, there seems to be a special viciousness that accompanies the current assault on human rights, in this country and in the world. We have had repressive governments before, but none has legislated the end of habeas corpus, nor openly supported torture, nor declared the possibility of war without end. No government has so casually ignored the will of the people, affirmed the right of the President to ignore the Constitution, even to set aside laws passed by Congress.
The time is right, then, for a national campaign calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Representative John Conyers, who held extensive hearings and introduced an impeachment resolution when the Republicans controlled Congress, is now head of the House Judiciary Committee and in a position to fight for such a resolution. He has apparently been silenced by his Democratic colleagues who throw out as nuggets of wisdom the usual political palaver about “realism” (while ignoring the realities staring them in the face) and politics being “the art of the possible” (while setting limits on what is possible).
I know I’m not the first to talk about impeachment. Indeed, judging by the public opinion polls, there are millions of Americans, indeed a majority of those polled, who declare themselves in favor if it is shown that the President lied us into war (a fact that is not debatable). There are at least a half-dozen books out on impeachment, and it’s been argued for eloquently by some of our finest journalists, John Nichols and Lewis Lapham among them. Indeed, an actual “indictment” has been drawn up by a former federal prosecutor, Elizabeth de la Vega, in a new book called United States v. George W. Bush et al, making a case, in devastating detail, to a fictional grand jury.
There is a logical next step in this development of an impeachment movement: the convening of “people’s impeachment hearings” all over the country. This is especially important given the timidity of the Democratic Party. Such hearings would bypass Congress, which is not representing the will of the people, and would constitute an inspiring example of grassroots democracy.
These hearings would be the contemporary equivalents of the unofficial gatherings that marked the resistance to the British Crown in the years leading up to the American Revolution. The story of the American Revolution is usually built around Lexington and Concord, around the battles and the Founding Fathers. What is forgotten is that the American colonists, unable to count on redress of their grievances from the official bodies of government, took matters into their own hands, even before the first battles of the Revolutionary War.
In 1772, town meetings in Massachusetts began setting up Committees of Correspondence, and the following year, such a committee was set up in Virginia. The first Continental Congress, beginning to meet in 1774, was a recognition that an extralegal body was necessary to represent the interests of the people. In 1774 and 1775, all through the colonies, parallel institutions were set up outside the official governmental bodies.
Throughout the nation’s history, the failure of government to deliver justice has led to the establishment of grassroots organizations, often ad hoc, dissolving after their purpose was fulfilled. For instance, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, knowing that the national government could not be counted on to repeal the act, black and white anti-slavery groups organized to nullify the law by acts of civil disobedience. They held meetings, made plans, and set about rescuing escaped slaves who were in danger of being returned to their masters.
In the desperate economic conditions of 1933 and 1934, before the Roosevelt Administration was doing anything to help people in distress, local groups were formed all over the country to demand government action. Unemployed Councils came into being, tenants’ groups fought evictions, and hundreds of thousands of people in the country formed self-help organizations to exchange goods and services and enable people to survive.
More recently, we recall the peace groups of the 1980s, which sprang up in hundreds of communities all over the country, and provoked city councils and state legislatures to pass resolutions in favor of a freeze on nuclear weapons. And local organizations have succeeded in getting more than 400 city councils to take a stand against the Patriot Act.
Impeachment hearings all over the country could excite and energize the peace movement. They would make headlines, and could push reluctant members of Congress in both parties to do what the Constitution provides for and what the present circumstances demand: the impeachment and removal from office of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Simply raising the issue in hundreds of communities and Congressional districts would have a healthy effect, and would be a sign that democracy, despite all attempts to destroy it in this era of war, is still alive.
About The Progressive
On January 9, 1909, Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. of Wisconsin founded La Follette's Weekly to be "a magazine of progress, social, intellectual, institutional." The goal, he wrote, was "winning back for the people the complete power over government — national, state, and municipal — which has been lost to them." He attacked private greed in the form of corporate monopolies that hoarded power. He championed the public interest, campaigning for social and economic justice. And he urged the United States not to entangle itself in foreign wars.
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In 2009, The Progressive celebrated its centennial by publishing its anthology, Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press). And the April 2009 issue of The Progressive was a special commemorative one. Devoting a single page to each year of The Progressive, this issue served up kernels of wisdom from the archives. It's a walk through 100 years of U.S. history and progressive history. And it includes quotations from Jane Addams, James Baldwin, Louis Brandeis, Theodore Dreiser, Sen. Russ Feingold, Molly Ivins, June Jordan, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, Jr., Sinclair Lewis, Milton Mayer, Arundhati Roy, Bertrand Russell, Edward Said, Cindy Sheehan, Upton Sinclair, Terry Tempest Williams, Gore Vidal, Paul Wellstone, and Howard Zinn.
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Meet the Editors
Matthew Rothschild, Editor
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and social justice in this country. Rothschild has appeared on Nightline, C-SPAN, The O'Reilly Factor, and NPR, and his newspaper commentaries have run in the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, and a host of other newspapers. Rothschild is also the author of a book entitled You Have No Rights: Stories of America in Our Repressive Age (New Press, 2007). A graduate of Harvard University, Rothschild prior to coming to The Progressive worked as the editor of Multinational Monitor, a magazine founded by Ralph Nader. Rothschild came to The Progressive in 1983, and has worked for the magazine in many different capacities, first as associate editor, then managing editor, then publisher, and since 1994 as editor. Rothschild brought on distinguished social critics as columnists, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, and Howard Zinn. He added monthly original poetry from the likes of Martín Espada and Adrienne Rich, and he added the humorists Kate Clinton and Will Durst. On the magazine's website, Rothschild contributes several times a week with his "This Just In" commentaries. And he keeps a running tally of civil liberties infringements in his "McCarthyism Watch." Rothschild writes monthly in The Progressive. He has interviewed Senator Russ Feingold, singer Ani DiFranco, Robert Redford, and the journalist Robert Fisk. He also hosts Progressive Radio, a syndicated weekly half-hour program, and he does radio commentaries Monday through Friday. Rothschild is also the co-founder and director of The Progressive Media Project, which since 1993 has been distributing opinion pieces to newspapers around the country in an effort to diversify and democratize the national debate. In 2007, Rothschild published his first book, You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression (The New Press). In 2009, he edited Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive, 1909-2009 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press).
Amitabh Pal, Managing Editor
Amitabh Pal came to the Progressive Media Project, an affiliate of The Progressive magazine, in 1997 as the associate editor. A few years later, he became the managing editor of The Progressive magazine. And for the last several years, he has served both in that capacity and as the co-editor of the Progressive Media Project. For The Progressive, Pal has written several articles on nonviolence, including a profile of Badshah Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. For The Progressive, he has interviewed Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, and Joseph Stiglitz. He also is finishing up his first book about nonviolent activism in Muslim societies, forthcoming from Praeger.
Ruth Conniff, Political Editor
Ruth Conniff covers national politics for The Progressive and is a voice of The Progressive on many TV and radio programs. Conniff was a regular on CNN's Sunday Capital Gang and is now a regular on PBS's To the Contrary. She also has appeared frequently on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and on NPR and Pacifica. Conniff's op-ed commentaries have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She also contributes regularly to Isthmus, Madison's weekly newspaper. Conniff became The Progressive's Associate Editor in 1991, and Managing Editor in January 1997. In recent years, she has interviewed William Greider, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth DiNovella, Culture Editor
Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive magazine. She writes about activism, politics, music, books, and film. She also produces Progressive Radio, a thirty-minute public affairs program hosted by Matthew Rothschild.
In recent years, she has interviewed Amy Goodman, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Elena Poniatoska for The Progressive.
DiNovella joined The Progressive staff in 2001. She became Associate Editor in 2002 and Culture Editor in 2003.
Before working for The Progressive, DiNovella was the News and Public Affairs Director at WORT-FM, the community radio station of Madison, Wisconsin. She now volunteers in the news department at WORT-FM.
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