Hotmail
Messenger
My MSN
MSN Directory
Who does impeachment/censure talk benefit?
Democrat Pelosi sees anti-Bush acts as diversion from election message
 Joshua Roberts / Reuters House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave the back of her hand to impeachment and censure talk. |
FIRST READ |
 |
WASHINGTON — Censure President Bush? Impeach him? Or discreetly kill those ideas to avoid fueling Republican intensity?
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has chosen the “discreetly kill” option, arguing that the current impeachment/censure talk is just a pointless distraction from the party’s message.
“I think that things are going well for the Democrats right now,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday, alluding to recent data showing that a plurality of poll respondents would prefer a Democratic-controlled House.
So why, she implied, should Democrats risk spoiling the mood?
She rebuffed the call by Sen. Russ Feingold, D- Wisc., to censure Bush for ordering National Security Agency surveillance of al Qaida contacts with persons in the United States without seeking warrants from a court.
“I have no idea why anybody would censure someone before they have an investigation,” she said.
Just win in November
As for impeachment, Pelosi asked, “Why doesn't everybody channel their energy into winning the election and understand that elections have ramifications?”
Once the Democrats win the House in November, she promised, they’d seek to enact a job creation program, universal health insurance, more funding for public education, “energy independence, and real security for our country.”
But House Democratic sources said that if Democrats win the majority in November, Democratic committee chairmen would use their oversight, investigative, and subpoena powers to gather evidence forming the foundation for a range of potential anti-Bush actions, including censure and impeachment.
Democrats need a net gain of 15 seats to win the House majority.
Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, now a Senate candidate, is on the same page as Pelosi. In an interview Thursday, Sanders at first said, “I’d rather not” talk about impeachment.
But then he added, “I don’t think it’s going to be an issue” in his Senate race.
“Five towns in my state voted to support impeachment. I thought it would be futile to introduce articles of impeachment. If we are serious about ending the reactionary-type government we have in the White House and the House and the Senate, our energy has to go into the national elections to make sure we end one-party government in the United States.”
Click for related story |
GOP cheers Feingold
From the way Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has acted since Feingold unveiled his censure idea last Sunday and from the flurry of delighted e-mails sent out by the Republican National Committee, Republicans appear to be elated that Feingold has put censure on the agenda.
The Wisconsin Democrat worked hard Thursday to convince reporters that his resolution was not a gift to the Republicans.
Feingold insisted that censure is not a diversion from the Democrats’ message, which is essentially that Bush and his administration are incompetent. “What I think some of my colleagues are missing,” he contended, “is that this (censure) actually fits in perfectly with this (Democratic theme of Bush’s alleged incompetence).”
He said Bush and his aides incompetently set up the NSA program by putting it outside the law, thus leading to someone leaking it to the New York Times.
He panned the news media’s coverage of his censure idea, chiding reporters Thursday at the Capitol: “The press decided immediately that this was a bad thing for Democrats and a good thing for conservatives. The facts don’t bear it out. You don’t have the polls to prove it.”
In combative language echoing Howard Dean’s in 2003, he criticized congressional Democrats who he said have “a tendency… to be afraid of taking a strong stand and stick to it.”
| Rate this story | Low | High |
MORE FROM POLITICS |
 Politics Section Front |
| Add Politics headlines to your news reader: |
Sponsored links