Vermont's impeachment push
Toolbox
Published: April 25, 2007
The push for impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney is picking up momentum in Vermont, giving powerful expression to the deepening dismay felt by Vermonters about the Iraq war and related issues.
As an expression of opposition, the impeachment movement sends a strong message. But as an actual course of action, impeachment would be the wrong direction for Congress to take.
The Vermont Senate gave new life to impeachment on Friday last week when Sen. Peter Shumlin, president pro tempore, reversed course and brought forward an impeachment resolution. He had resisted impeachment in the belief it would consume too much time on the legislative calendar. But on Friday he brought it to the Senate floor to see if quick action was possible, and the Senate passed the resolution by a vote of 16-9. Now the grassroots movement pushing impeachment is planning a big day at the Statehouse today to urge action in the House.
The drama over impeachment is of more than local interest. That's because historic precedent allows a member of Congress to respond to a legislative resolution for impeachment by asking for an impeachment resolution in the U.S. House.
Congress is not required to respond to a legislative resolution on impeachment. Nor can a state legislature require any member of Congress to call for an impeachment investigation. Jefferson's Manual, frequently cited by impeachment advocates, is the body of rules and precedents governing the procedures of Congress, and there are precedents from 1903 and 1808 when the House launched impeachment investigations in response to resolutions from state and territorial resolutions. But the decision of whether to act is up to the U.S. House.
Vermont's three-man congressional delegation continues to argue that the public interest would be served better by pressing ahead with congressional investigations into the many instances of Bush administration malfeasance and that impeachment would be an unproductive diversion.
Vermont House Speaker Gaye Symington agrees, saying that impeachment would overshadow all the good work now under way on global warming, fired prosecutors and a host of other issues. She is more interested in getting the nation back on track than in exacting retribution or imposing justice on two men who will be out of office in 21 months anyway.
It is hard for a leader to turn a deaf ear to a popular uproar, and Symington has wrestled with how to square the uproar against her belief that impeachment would be unproductive. She wasn't sure what would happen if she brought a resolution to the floor. It might be referred to the House Judiciary Committee, which opposes impeachment, or it might be defeated on the floor.
Ultimately, it will be the leaders of the U.S. House who will determine if impeachment goes forward, and they are unlikely to go that way. A Vermont resolution is not going to persuade them to change course, though it would increase the pressure on Rep. Peter Welch. In the end, impeachment as a symbolism magnifies the dissatisfaction with Bush. Impeachment as a real course of action would turn anger at Bush into a self-defeating partisan war. Members of the Vermont House will have to decide whether the symbolic is more important than the real.
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