I'm beginning to understand why Pelosi resisted impeachment proceedings against Bush.

[pnwmom]

It was the issue of precedent -- even though we all know he well deserved it, impeachment had been an extremely rare event in history and she wanted to keep it that way.

If a Republican President had been impeached immediately after a Democratic President, that could be seen by many as revenge --and the new order of business. There would be little holding them back from impeaching Obama now.

But the Democratic house did not impeach Bush; so if the House Republicans impeach Obama -- the second popular Democrat in a row -- they risk a serious backlash, and they know it.

[Scuba]

1. The Pukes will try impeachment this term. Not prosecuting war criminals is a poor precedent.

[pnwmom]

2. If they try it, they will be exposed as the anti-democratic obstructionists that they are. n/t

[RKP5637]

27. And the domestic terrorists that they are! n/t

[babylonsister]

36. They're already exposed for any soul paying attention, but they'll try anyway. nt

[phleshdef]

3. I hope they do try it.

[theaocp]

6. Yup.

Justice is not blind, it turns out. War criminals get away ... it's the new chance card.

[Cosmocat]

7. I agree, but I will note this

we likely would not have had the AHCA, or a lot of the other things that got done during the first term.

I totally get your point, and there is a part of me that I want that same accountability, and to, for ONCE, maybe, not let them get away with it.

But, there would have been ramifications.

How bad it was with the clown ass tea party crape, making health care reform into an attack on our freedom, ect.

It would have, somehow, been a lot worse, and who knows if November would have turned out the way it did. You KNOW the so called liberal media would have put it on Barrack Obama that the evil democrats had the temerity to hold the scumbag jaggoffs who lied the country into a war of choice accountable.

[Wednesdays]

10. If it’s any consolation, I don't think there's a statute of limitations on war crimes

There's still plenty of time, provided Smirky doesn't drink himself to death.

[onenote]

17. How do you define "try impeachment"?

If all you mean is that some republican will introduce a bill to initiate an impeachment inquiry, you're right, but that's hardly surprising. Every President since Reagan (and including Reagan) has had at least one impeachment resolution introduced against him.

If you are saying that there will be a floor vote on such a resolution, I would take the bet that won't happen.

[dixiegrrrrl]

34. Gotta admit, it will make one hell of a distraction....

[patrice]

4. I think it would have created millions of opportunities to make a martyr out of him, especially

relative to that "scoundrel" Bill Clinton who was impeached, which I assure you we would have heard plenty of distraction about that, effective distraction, because that was about sex and lying which is much more important than life-and-death lying and I don't mean that sarcastically, just turn on your tv.

Instead of George Bush being tried and found guilty in the more authentic venue of the zeitgeist of the USA, the media would have had its circu$$$$$$$$ propaganda and George's position today would be that much more positive than it is.

[Cosmocat]

8. I agree

the so called "liberal media" absolutely would have followed the republican's lead and absolutely punished the democrats and Barrack Obama for it. Who knows, it is all speculation, but my guess is November would have been A LOT different.

[Enrique]

5. that's exactly the way I looked at it

and now when people talk about their impeachment threats I think the same thing as you. If they impeach Obama, it's telling everyone, the GOP will ALWAYS impeach a Democratic president, it's what they do.

[Cosmocat]

14. It won't matter a lot

Only because this president is an exceptionally good guy and very charismatic, and pretty darn strident about doing things ethically and the right way, will the media tacitly just accept it, without piling on.

You will get more of the current theme - it is his fault they are acting like jackasses because he has not given them everything they wanted and more.

But, it won't change how things are from where they are now.

It will be like it never existed, and the next time we have a democratic president they will impeach him or her again and it will be OK, because when the Rs do it, it is OK. BUT, there is ALWAYS a reason an R should not be held accountable, even if he or she lies the country into a war of choice or whatever.

[Skittles]

9. heaven forbid JUSTICE might be served!

IT MIGHT LOOK BAD!!!

[bvar22]

31. It might look bad,...

..and Rush Limbaugh would say bad things about Democrats.
Much better to just look away and let the War Crimes slide.
THAT sets a much better precedent.

[JEB]

42. However misguided,

the Pukes fight tooth and nail for their side. The Dems appease and play nice.

[Skittles]

48. CORRECT

[oldhippydude]

11. bingo we need to maintain the higher ground...

the reason we will ultimately prevail, is that in time the public will become tired non governess.... the public rightfully saw the Clinton impeachment as a distraction, and a non issue, as they increasingly view Republican recalcitrance.. our worst mistake would be imitating the party bent on self destruction..

to impeach W would have put us on the road of impeachment as "the new normal" Gog knows Republicans have enough cards in their game deck without adding another joker..

still in my heart of hearts I would love to see bushies and bankers in jail!!

[truedelphi]

12. How do the Republicans risk a backlash?

After all, the Republicans impeached Bill Clinton, blowing his marital infidelity all out of proportion... What was the backlash there?

I don't seem to recall there being a backlash - except that Gore didn't use Bill Clinton in his campaign trail in 2000, due to his perception that it would hurt him.

And here's a significant point you left out of your analysis - if Pelosi originally thought that various items that Bush was guilty of deserved impeachment - then she damn well should have gone forward with the impeachment. If she didn't think he was guilty of doing some illegal things, (such as lying the nation into a war against Iraq,) then why the hell did she bring the matter up to begin with?

[truedelphi]

18. You're right - I had her on my

Mental list of those who stated that if the Congress got a Dem majority after the 2006 elections, she'd pursue impeachment. But she wasn't on that list. Several other Dems I liked from that era were, and I had her mashed up in that list.

Sadly, the first thing the Dem Majority Congress did with its new powers was to raise the postal rates on small businesses, while letting the Big Media giants have discounts!

[onenote]

22. There was a definite backlash against repubs

In the 1998 elections, which occurred in the midst of the impeachment fight, the repubs lost five seats in the House and failed to pick up any seats in the Senate. It was the first time since 1934 that the party not controlling the White House had failed to pick up seats in a mid term election and the first time since 1822 that the party not controlling the White House failed to pick up seats in a midterm election during a president's second term.

Gore kept his distance from Clinton during the 2000 election, a decision which probably hurt him more than it helped him (although he still managed to win the popular vote and, but for the intervention of the SCOTUS, might have been declared winner of the electoral college vote as well). The repubs lost two more seats in the House and four seats in the Senate.

[sadbear]

13. I'm fairly certain President Obama will be impeached.

The House teapublicans have no grasp of reality and Boehner is too weak to control them.

[onenote]

24. And I'm fairly certain that he won't be

I guess we will know in four years which of us is right.

I will point out, however, if the repubs were so gung ho to impeach President Obama, why didn't anyone offer a resolution to do so in 2011 after the Repubs had surged to a commanding margin of control in the House and the President's popularity was lagging?

[sadbear]

26. Waiting for a "plausible" reason, perhaps?

President Obama was very careful his first term, IMO, in order to protect his reelection chances. Now that he doesn't have that hanging over him, if he does issue significant executive orders concerning the 2nd Amendment, I think they'll trounce. We'll see.

[onenote]

45. The tea partiers thought that "Obamacare" was unconstitutional, too

They called him a socialist. But they didn't try to impeach. And they won't really try this time either.

[bdublu]

59. "Obamacare" was found unconstitutional

in the sense of the federal government requiring individuals to purchase a product, therefor violating the commerce clause. The only reason it did pass was because Justice Kennedy opined that the mandate is a tax, which congress does have the right to levy. The more you know...

[onenote]

60. it was cj roberts, not kennedy

Justice Kennedy dissented. It was CJ Roberts that agreed with four other justices that the mandate was constitutional as a tax. And the way the law works, the bottom line is not that the mandate was unconstitutional. The bottom line is that it is constitutional.

[TeamPooka]

16. Fuck the House GOP. nt

[stupidicus]

20. and the failure to do so resulted in what

oh that's right, the unimpeded pursuit of the crazy we are afflicted with today.

"The people" actually supported the impeachment of Bush, unlike Clinton.

https://www.google.com/search?q=poll+bush+impeachment&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGHP_en

[Baitball Blogger]

21. We know all about it.

At least, though of us who had to live through the Lieberman years. There is always an excuse of some sort.

[NPolitics1979]

23. Maybe Democrats thought a lame duck Bush was better than the evil Dick Cheney.

[coldbeer]

25. she did not have the votes

she explained that

[orpupilofnature57]

28. She got drunk on the gavel, first women head of congress,,

let's call it what it was, she was duped, and not alone .

[PDittie]

29. I'm thinking that NOT impeaching Bush was a precedent in and of itself.

We simply aren't holding presidents -- or Congress members for that matter -- accountable to we, the peops.

(This post isn't meant to slam Obama, or suggest that impeachment is a good idea. Thought I should add that.)

[grahamhgreen]

30. NO. You are creating a class of people who live above the law. VERY bad.

[forestpath]

32. Yeah, what's a war based on lies! A little thing like that? Pshaw!

Nancy had better things to do than impeach Bush over something like that, like doing some of that legal-for-congress insider trading.

[obxhead]

33. Impeach Obama for what exactly?

Other than continuing many of the crimes of the last administration that is.

[NYC Liberal]

35. Republicans -- including Henry Hyde -- openly stated that the Clinton impeachment was "payback"

for Nixon's resignation. They were and are shameless.

[NYtoBush-Drop Dead]

37. it's bullshit.

The AG should have investigated everything that Bushco and the Big Dick did while in office.

[Skittles]

49. CORRECT

the lack of investigation ensures history will repeat itself

[sulphurdunn]

38. Now that he is no longer

President he can be investigated and remanded to the Hague for war crimes prosecution.

[MrSlayer]

39. Reagan should have been impeached.

Poppy too. By NOT impeaching these fucking assholes we allowed the rule of law to disappear. They impeached Clinton for no reason and they'll try it with Obama. Why do we care about decorum and the fact that it's rare when these sons of bitches commit serious impeachable offenses but they do it to us for no reason at all?

Democrats are too weak or too complicit to ever do what is right.

[bvar22]

40. "Sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless of the political consequences."

In 2002, Paul Wellstone was fighting a tough re-election battle in Minnesota with Republican Norm Coleman. With a month to go, they were tied in the polls.

Big Name Republicans were crowding Minnesota with Rallies and Fund Raisers for Coleman. President George Bush and Vice President Cheney spent so much time in Minnesota for Coleman that they could have claimed residency.

The nation was swept up in a WAR frenzy,
and any resistance to the Iraq invasion was viciously attacked as unpatriotic.
In this atmosphere of Nationalistic Blood Lust, the Bush Administration brought the Authorization to Use Force in Iraq (Iraq War Resolution) to vote on October 16, 2002, just two weeks before the elections,
and DARED Democrats to vote against it.

ALL of Wellstone's political advisers told Paul that voting against the IWR would cost him the election, and that it was going to pass anyway, with or without his vote.

On the day of the vote, Wellstone joined with 21 other Democratic Senators to cast a "Nay" vote on giving Bush the authorization to attack Iraq. Of the 21 who voted NO, Wellstone was the only one engaged in a close re-election battle.

After the vote, the consensus among the experts and pundits was that Wellstone now had ZERO chance to win the election in 2 weeks, and had thrown the election away ion a Unwise Symbolic Vote. When interviewed on TV the night after the vote, with predictions of Wellstone's coming defeat dominating the TV, he was asked WHY he voted against the WAR.

Wellstone admitted to a lengthy and difficult struggle with his conscience the night before the vote, commented on the fact that it might have cost him the election, and then said,[font size=3]"...but sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless of the political consequences."[/font]

Then the unexpected happened.
Wellstone SURGED in the polls, and was ahead and increasing the margin when he and his wife were killed in a plane crash on October 25th, 2002, just 9 days after his stand against the Bush Administration,
and a week before the election.

The other 20 Democratic Senators who voted against the Iraq War:
Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii)
Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico)
Barbara Boxer (D-California)
Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia)
Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota)
Jon Corzine (D-New Jersey)
Mark Dayton (D-Minnesota)
Dick Durbin (D-Illinois)
Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin)
Bob Graham (D-Florida)
Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)
Jim Jeffords (I-Vermont)
Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts)
Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
Carl Levin (D-Michigan)
Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland)
Patty Murray (D-Washington)
Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island)
Paul Sarbanes (D-Maryland)
Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan)
Ron Wyden (D-Oregon)



[font color=firebrick size=3][center]"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone[/font][/center]
[center][/font]
[font size=1]photo by bvar22
Shortly before Sen Wellstone was killed[/center][/font]

[font size=5 color=firebrick]Solidarity![/font]

[chuckstevens]

41. Politically, your are right. However;

It is kind of like the Allies in 1945 saying, "we can't prosecute Nazi War criminals because that will just lead to victorious nations always trying the defeated military leaders as war criminals." Some crimes go way beyond politics and what Bush, Cheney, and Rove did were serious criminal acts. Nancy Pelosi shouldn't have taken anything off the table as a warning to future generations that we, the American public, will hold people accountable for criminal acts.

The REAL FAILURE, however, was letting the Iran/Contra criminals get off way too easy. The Neocons were embolden, knowing that a crime far worse than Watergate would have few consequences. Once they came in with W, they went full throttle on ignoring the constitution and Obama has continued some of it.

[The Wizard]

43. Republicans can't help it

They're jerkoffs.

[JEB]

44. The only way

to stop a bully is to stand up to him. Every time he gets a pass, he gets that much meaner and that much more confident. We are all enablers for letting those criminals go unpunished. Makes me sick.

[TheMadMonk]

46. No what that says is she knew the system was broken...

...and any attempt on her part to uphold the law would be used as a precedent to break it at the earliest opportunity.

The ONLY reason Obama could be impeached today is that she failed to impeach Bush, and that Obama has since made pretty much every impeachable offence of the Bush admin his own.

What Pelosi did was take impeachment off the table for all time, except as a political tool.

[aggiesal]

47. The House will Impeach him, . . .

but the Senate will never convict him.

This would just be grandstanding, because the House Republicans
know that they'll never get a conviction out of the Democratic Senate.

What a colossal waste of money.

[orpupilofnature57]

50. Getting back to why we didn't impeach the

Biggest misanthrope ever to Victimize our country . Obama-Bashing is so much easier, even with his stupendous record of being presidentially Successful .

[aggiesal]

52. Pelosi had the house and would have easily impeached Bush . . .

Reid had the Senate with at minimum 59 Senator caucusing with the
Democrats, so Idiot Boy could have easily been convicted if Pelosi would
have put Impeachment on the table.

[orpupilofnature57]

62. +1000 !!!!

[leftynyc]

63. You need 2/3 to convict

Which 8 republicans would have voted to convict?

[liberal N proud]

51. Only the Democrats feel it should be rare and used for extreme cases.

The Republicans call for it at the turn of a hat.

[kestrel91316]

53. They will try, this year I think. AND THEY WILL FAIL. Again.

This time it will make reasonable people even angrier than when they did it to Clinton. It will seem like they are looking to do it to EVERY Democrat and will be seen as the spiteful, vindictive act of racism that it is.

So bring it on, I say.

[pnwmom]

55. Exactly. It WILL then be apparent that this is how they're going to deal

with every Democratic President, since they can't seem to win a fair election.

[blkmusclmachine]

54. Riiiiight.

[HeiressofBickworth]

56. There are three reasons the GOP House members will try to impeach:

1. Romney/GOP lost the election
2. The GOP can't stand a Black President
3. They want to teach other "uppity n...rs" to stay in their place (which definitely ISN'T the White House)

With Clinton, the GOP had only one reason to impeach:
1. Bush I lost the election

And, no, the Senate will never convict but the message will have been sent to any other person of color who might like to make a go at being elected to the highest office in the country.

The GOP does not take election losses lightly. They now are trying to figure a way to rig elections so another Democrat can never win any election.

The GOP is so sickeningly, frighteningly evil it is beyond any words I can muster to define.

[JHB]

64. With Bush I it wasn't just 1 reason: they were hankering for payback for Nixon

All the conservatives who thought Watergate was only a big deal because the "liberal media" and the Democrats made it one wanted to even the score. Some of them said so openly, but those comments weren't as titillating to the Washington press corps as the latest leak from the (conservative activist judge) court-sanctioned fishing expedition against Clinton, so their comments got buried.

[NewJeffCT]

66. Agreed - it was revenge for Nixon

another reason is that it got the GOP base all riled up & ready for action. Sure, it may have been unpopular with the American public in general, but it kept the base fired up and it slowed down the White House with all the attention/media frenzy paid to the hearings. So, the GOP didn't care. The impeachment did its job - they retained the House until 2006.

[Kablooie]

57. Problem is that most House Republicans don't care about backlash.

They are gerrymandered in and don't have to worry about upsetting voters.
They will win no matter how much the country turns against them.
That's why they can consider all these insane options.
They are immune from real world consequences.

[Third Doctor]

58. The Repubs in Congress treatment of the President

is already unprecedented. The Dems did not block everything Bush wanted to do or call him a liar during his state of the union speech but they did this to Obama. This means they are ready and willing to impeach Obama if they can.

[stultusporcos]

61. Pelosi's refusal to impeach W has given a Get out of Jail Free Card to All Future Presidents

All the GOP has to do is screech impeachment for any BS reason, like they are doing now, and in the mind of the idiot public, impeachment becomes just another sound bite on the TV and radio and become trivial and meaningless.

Now when real crimes are committed like by W and his criminal regime, impeachment no longer becomes a real an option, so nothing will get done about the criminal activity.

Thanks Nancy and PBO your refusal to go after W has now set the precedent that it is A-OK for the POTUS to openly commit crimes and future POTUS’s will always have the back of the former POTUS providing political and legal cover of the former POTUS’s illegal activities.

Just ask Spain how the current administration blocked investigations into W for war crimes.

Yup change I damn sure don’t believe in.

[bemildred]

65. Pelosi can count.

No further explanation required.

[progressoid]

67. Or maybe it's because so many Democrats supported the same things

that everyone wanted Bush impeached for.