Remarks at Emergency Impeachment Conference
in New York City, February 17, 2007.
It's an honor to be speaking with these panelists
and it's great to be back in New York. But I want to ask you one
thing about New York, because there's something I heard Senator
Hillary Clinton say and I want to know if it's true. Is it true
that if you live in New York you have to support this war? Can
you live in New York and work for peace?
That's what I thought.
I got up at 2 a.m. this morning in Charlottesville,
Va., my town and the town of Thomas Jefferson, the man whose greatest
fear for our republic was of elected despotism. Jefferson and
Madison and Mason and the others who drafted the most influential
Constitution the world has seen, created a system of elections,
but devoted much more attention and many more words to creating
a system for maintaining our democracy in between elections. They
gave this essential power to the House of Representatives, as
the branch most subject to popular control, and they called this
power impeachment.
The founders knew that democracy could only be
maintained through eternal vigilance. But we – or perhaps
more G.E. and Disney than we – have substituted for eternal
vigilance an eternal election season. I don't know if the founders
could have imagined the way in which elections are killing our
democracy, but they certainly imagined that the loss of the power
of impeachment would mean a return to tyranny.
No one can say exactly how long our window of opportunity
is to get impeachment up and running before it's effectively blocked
by the November 2008 election. Is it too late already? Do we have
two months? Three months? Four months? Wiser minds than mine seem
inclined to think we may have until roughly the end of April to
get the impeachment process up and running. That doesn't mean
we shouldn't keep pushing until January 2009 if need be. But it
does mean that if you or your organization are on the edge of
accepting the need for impeachment you should bear in mind that
it will be much more helpful for you to make that decision right
now than later this year or next year.
Seventeen Republicans took a tiny step forward
against the war on Friday. They did that because Republican voters
are turning against Bush and Cheney. Republicans should think
very hard about something. Do you, as a Republican, want future
Democratic presidents to have the ability to rewrite laws with
signing statements? Do you want them to have the ability to spy
on you with no legal oversight? I know Libertarians don't want
that. Congressman Ron Paul says Bush should be impeached, but
Congressman Paul has not found the nerve to do anything about
it – yet.
The Green party publicly stands for impeachment.
Every other party should join them.
Impeachment is not a means of empowering a party.
It's a way to empower the American people and the first branch
of our government, the Congress. But the fact is that if the Democratic
Party takes a stand for impeachment, it will gain the respect
and support of Americans and of people all over the world, and
it will be rewarded. When the Democrats failed to impeach Reagan
for Iran-Contra, thinking they could thereby win elections, they
lost elections and put George Bush I in power – and we are
suffering from that still. Americans do not vote for cowardice.
They voted for Democrats post-Nixon, but not post-Reagan.
The current crop of Democrats has shown that it
will not act to end the war without some sort of kick-start, something
to strengthen the hand of opponents of Bush and Cheney. Impeachment
is the one thing that might shift the balance.
A labor union member and peace activist sent me
an Email yesterday that said: If the peace movement wants to succeed,
we can't fail to employ the threat of impeachment any more than
a union can promise never to go on strike.
Right now, unions are lobbying hard to pass the
Employee Free Choice Act, which would restore the right to effectively
organize unions in this country. But Cheney has promised to have
Bush veto it. It is time for unions to threaten a strike. In politics
a strike is called impeachment.
Environmental organizations are concerned that
we don't have to many years to reverse our energy policy if we
are going to reverse global warming. But any bills to do that
will be vetoed or signing statemented. You cannot tell me that
you care about global warming and that you're willing to sit on
your hands for two full years because impeachment is not your
focus. It had better become your focus or the rest of us are going
to learn about global warming the hard way.
Pick an issue, any issue, and a compelling case
can be made that your priority for the next few months should
be impeachment. Failing to pursue impeachment will mean two more
years of war, detention, torture, and abuse, and the defunding
of every useful public project. Two years is a quarter of the
Bush, Cheney presidency. Pick any past two years of that presidency,
and you have an idea of the catastrophe we're facing. The results
of it will last well beyond the end of the two years.
To recognize the gravity of the impeachable offenses
that Cheney and Bush have committed and yet not work to end them
because your focus is elsewhere is, in many cases, to lose your
focus. A citizen who does not work for impeachment when it is
merited, is a neighbor who watches a murder and does not intervene.
We're all busy. We all have vitally important missions. But that's
a murder outside the window. You wouldn't watch and do nothing.
But the Bush Administration is killing hundreds of thousands of
people every year by acts of commission and omission, people of
Iraq, of Africa, of New Orleans, of the world. And if we fail
to impeach, we will establish the precedent to allow future presidents
to do the same and worse.
Impeachment is the nonviolent answer to this crisis.
We should feel no animosity toward any human being, and we should
condemn all acts of violence. This is absolutely essential if
we are to succeed. But we should act with deliberateness and determination
to restore the rule of law and hold accountable those who would
place themselves above it.
David Swanson is the Washington Director of
Democrats.com
and of ImpeachPAC.org.
He is co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org
coalition, creator of MeetWithCindy.org,
and a board member of Progressive
Democrats of America, and of the Backbone
Campaign. He was the organizer in 2006 of Camp
Democracy. He serves on the steering committee of the Charlottesville
Center for Peace and Justice and on a working group of United
for Peace and Justice. His website is www.davidswanson.org. |