Rep. Conyers: Impeachment Is Not Off the Table

Rep. Conyers: Impeachment Is Not Off the Table
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on January 29, 2008 at 6:35 AM.

Today at the Progressive Media Summit I managed to catch a conversation between Rob Kall of OpedEdNews and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers on the potential impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. The video starts in the middle of a sentence, but other than that, it's pretty clear cut. It's an interesting dialogue in which Conyers goes back and forth on his own authority and ability to bring impeachment charges, his political arguments against it, and finally, his firm statement that Bush could do plenty to justify impeachment and that the option is not 'off the table'. You get to see a fascinating and very human interaction between a highly intelligent activist and a sitting Congressman with immense power who is vaguely irritated at having to answer questions, but also intensely interested in answering them.

The transcript is as follows:


John Conyers: Two impeachments rather than one. They've either got to be simultaneous or serie atum.


Rob Kall: Serie atum would be the way to do it. First Cheney, then Bush. History teaches us, let's start with Gonzales. We went to Gonzales, and he's gone. They went to Agnew, he left. Then they went to Nixon, and they started doing hearings on him. It never went to a vote in the Senate. And I don't think it ever would. All we need to do is get the hearings opened up where they can't say 'sorry, executive privilege, then you've got the tools, which is what Impeachment is, it's a tool.


John Conyers: You know who's been in more impeachment hearings than anybody in the House or Senate?


Rob Kall: You?


John Conyers: Right.


Rob Kall: And you wrote a book on impeaching Bush, too.


John Conyers: A couple, yes. Well there must be some compelling reason that I'm not doing it right now.


Rob Kall: Pelosi, Pelosi keeps coming to mind.


John Conyers: How could she stop, well, she could stop me because actually it goes through a special committee on the House, but, Pelosi can't stop me from anything, really.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/75296/#more

... jus' sayin' ...

just agreeing;-)

And quickly! They're doing the "WMD!" thing about Iran!

held behind bars, cause they will poison the system again, those neo cons are involved in every branch of government. All those who signed the PNAC agreement should be held accountable, instead of running around spewing their poison around.

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

Gary Bauer Jeb Bush Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes

Aaron Friedberg Frank Gaffney Fred C. Ikle Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby Norman Podhoretz Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen Henry S. Rowen George Weigel

:wtf: :eyes:

Impeach!

I'm a bit surprised no one discussed that part yet.

OK let's hear it..........

...of both Bush and Cheney, in reverse order, but I've also had to wrestle with the fact that impeachment is a two-edged sword; to wit; If the order of impeachment and replacement of these two isn't handled correctly, Nancy Pelosi would become President. No matter how temporary that might turn out to be, it makes me throw up to think of that woman in the office of President of the United States when she has been such a disaster as Speaker!

I hope we'll all know someday exactly *what* has caused Mr. Conyers to behave in such an apparently irrational way -- after doing investigations down in a basement and writing an in-depth report about the impeachable crimes of this administration, and then to cave when 2007 rolled around? Something's rotten somewhere.

said that 'the rumor' is there will be Impeachment Hearings from Nov. 5 to Jan. 19...because there is nothing to do then.

Very, very disappointing to say the least.

While Conyers may have uttered the words "it is not off the table", the rest of what he said made it abundantly clear that it IS off the table, at least unless Bush does something additional that is even worse than any of the long and terrible list of things he's already done -- a first-use nuclear strike on Iran I suppose, or something like that.

Edit: actually, it is the title of the original article that I take issue with, not kpete's subject line, which is just a literal quote.