Tricky Republicans Give Cheney Impeachment New Life

“In his conduct while Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, in violation of his constitutional oath to … defend the Constitution … has purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests,” said Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), reading articles of impeachment against Cheney on the House floor Tuesday.x30x31 After seeing his impeachment bill, H.R. 333, sit moldering in committee for a half year, Kucinich used a “privileged resolution” to bring it to the House floor for debate. But Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), before taking the House speakership this year, had declared that “impeachment is off the table.” And her lieutenant, Steney Hoyer (D-MD), moved to “table” the resolution, which in the House of Representatives means to delay it forever—to kill it. With just a minority of Democrats supporting the impeachment resolution, the motion to kill began sailing through—until a Republican congressman, John Shadegg got an idea.x32 “I’d like to know how far left [Democrats] are,” he said. “It seems to me they owe it to their base to have an up-or-down vote.” So Republicans began voting against killing the bill, and the bill survived. But they failed to get the debate and subsequent vote to reject the bill, when nearly all Democrats voted to send it back to the Judiciary Committee, from where it came. But now the bill has a new number (H.R. 799) and a new breath of life.