Rocky Anderson - a reminder of some REAL Democratic Spine!

AMY GOODMAN: Rocky Anderson, the Mayor of Salt Lake City, is one of the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration and the Iraq war. Earlier this year he called for the impeachment of President Bush, calling him a “war criminal” who has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Rocky Anderson is also well regarded for his local politics. Last year, The Nation magazine praised him instituting “some of the most creative, thoughtful and radical urban policies anywhere in America.”

Today, Rocky Anderson is in New York to participate in an evening event calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. He will be speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Mayor Anderson joins us now. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROCKY ANDERSON: Real pleasure to see you, Amy. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Impeachment is off the table, though, in Washington, D.C. Your party, the Democratic Party, the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said no, that that’s not the direction they’re going to go. One of the chief proponents of it, John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, has backed off of that demand, yet you continue.

ROCKY ANDERSON: Well, yeah, I’ve taken my “proud Democrat” coffee mug out of my shelf and put it into storage for a while.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you going to do like Michael Bloomberg has done? Are you going to leave your party?

ROCKY ANDERSON: I’m not proud of my party. You know, I expected a George Bush and Cheney will come along and try to abuse their power and usurp and undermine the balance of power, disregard the rule of law, and I expect sometimes that the Republican Party is going to support them in that, as we saw during the regime of Richard Nixon.

What I don't expect is that we not have an opposition party all these years, that we not have a party who will stand up against the fiscal recklessness, about the lies that have driven us into this disastrous war of aggression. And I am ashamed of the Democratic Party. There have been a few heroes, a few people that have stood up, but the party as a whole, I think, has been a dismal failure these last several years in standing up to this insanity.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to last October. The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader in the then-Republican-controlled Congress, was asked by 60 Minutes’s Lesley Stahl whether the Democrats would pursue the impeachment of President Bush if Democrats gained control of the House.

NANCY PELOSI: Impeachment is off the table.

LESLEY STAHL: Off the table. And that’s a pledge?

NANCY PELOSI: Well, it’s a pledge. Yes, and it’s a pledge. Of course, it is. And it is a waste of time.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Nancy Pelosi.

ROCKY ANDERSON: It seems very odd to me that any Democrat would say that a constitutional remedy, a remedy the founders felt very strongly about, when a president through his or her wrongdoing is doing damage to our country, that that remedy would ever be off the table. There can only be one reason for it, and that’s the Democrats want to politically cash in on this disastrous administration in the 2008 elections. And I think that’s wrong.

I think that when we have a president who has blatantly violated our own Constitution, our own treaty obligations, our own statutory law, abused his powers in remarkable ways, undermined the balance of power, exerted a unitary executive power unknown to this country and to our democracy, and at the same time betrayed his trust with our Congress, with the American people, by his deceit in leading us into this war and through his utter incompetency -- if impeachment were ever called for, this is certainly the time, and this is exactly what the founders had in mind.

complete interview here:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/25/1421228