"...They came together to discuss whether the Bush administration has committed impeachable offenses and, if so, if Congress should act immediately to impeach him.
"I think this war is a waste of lives, time and money," St. Charles resident Glenda Alar
said. "It's not going to solve anything."
Her husband, Bill, agreed.
"Our country's reputation has been destroyed," he said.
The World Can't Wait Web site says the organization is urging "people living in the United States to take responsibility to stop the whole disastrous course led by the Bush administration. We seek to create a political situation where the Bush administration's program is repudiated, where Bush himself is driven from office and where the whole direction he has been taking U.S. society is reversed."
Town hall meetings on impeaching the Bush administration are being held across the country over the next several weeks.
Panelists at the Batavia forum included Jason Snart, associate professor of English at the College of DuPage, Nick Stein, member of the board of the Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and Liz Lazdins of the World Can't Wait Chicago Steering Committee.
Lazdins said Bush has abused the public's trust with illegal wiretappings, gross negligence to respond to the Hurricane Katrina crisis, failure to provide adequate health care to veterans and lying about weapons of mass destruction.
"Now he has opened Pandora's Box in the Middle East. We can't just wait until 2008 and let them walk away from this travesty," Lazdins said. "We have to hold them accountable now."
While some said the struggle to impeach Bush will take years longer than the President has left in office, holding the President and his administration accountable is still necessary.
"The success lies in the insistence of bringing to light all of the lies, treachery and mal-administration," Snart said.
"The issue is the moral obligation that faces us all," added Stein. "What are we going to say for ourselves to subsequent generations when they ask us, 'What were you doing while people in Afghanistan and Iran were being bombed?' We have an obligation to make impeachment the issue."
While Johnson disagreed with the stance of most people at the meeting, he strongly supports their right of the first amendment's freedom of speech.
"I'll die for their right to be wrong," he said."

(From Batavia, Illinois

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"My Turn: Arguments against impeachment fall short

Published: Thursday, May 31, 2007
By Dennis Morrisseau

Two objections raised by opponents of impeachment are: 1) impeachment would distract from the investigations that are happening right now and 2) given the political landscape, it is not possible to achieve the two-thirds majority in the Senate necessary to convict, so why proceed?

These arguments are nonsense or worse.

1. Impeachment would heighten focus on investigations of wrongdoing. Here is the text of the U.S. House resolution in the Nixon impeachment (HR.803, Feb. 6, 1974):

"Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary acting as a whole or by any subcommittee thereof appointed by the Chairman for the purposes hereof and in accordance with the Rules of the Committee, is authorized and directed to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America. The committee shall report to the House of Representatives such resolutions, articles of impeachment, or other recommendations as it deems proper."

2. Only the House Judiciary Committee takes up impeachment. That committee can and historically it has been able to handle other tasks simultaneously with an impeachment investigation. It can cite other investigations by other committees of the House and Senate, giving increased prominence to those investigations; but nothing about impeachment would stop other committees from pursuing investigations of interest to them, or the regular work of Congress.

In April alone, while conducting its attorney purge investigation, the committee had time to pass a federal hate crimes bill, express concern about a raid at a mall in Chicago, look for justice for survivors of the 1921 Tulsa riot, examine federal judicial compensation, and investigate Katrina's impact on New Orleans' criminal justice system. But even if impeachment were to take up the whole attention of the House Judiciary Committee, that amounts to another investigation -- in this case, one that reaches all the way to Bush and Cheney -- something other investigations at this point are not doing. We might want to ask why.

3. Not even Republicans are stones. Discovery of wrongdoing by Bush or Cheney will move Republican votes. There are 49 Republicans in the present Senate, 21 of whom will have to face the voters in 2008. In 1974 there were 42 Republican senators -- clearly enough to block impeachment of Nixon. But Nixon resigned prior to an impeachment vote after House Judiciary Committee hearings very clearly sketched in for Americans just what Nixon had allowed to be done on his watch and a delegation of Republican Senators told him bluntly that he would receive no more than 15 supporting votes out of 42 Republicans in the Senate. The reason for the lack of Republican support for Nixon was clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing unearthed during the Watergate criminal investigations.
"

(From Burlington, Vermont)

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