A Bulk Rate on Printing Subpoenas?

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A Bulk Rate on Printing Subpoenas?
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2006-11-08 12:50. Elections | Impeachment
By David Swanson

Chairman John Conyers Jr. Chairman Henry Waxman. Those titles will prove to be the most important outcome of yesterday's elections, even if the Dems get the Senate too. It's investigation and impeachment time. Vice President Cheney has already announced his plans to "probably" refuse to obey a subpoena from Congress. Democrats need to be preparing for that crisis now. And I don't mean just elected Democrats. I mean you and everyone you know who has the sanity to no longer call themselves Republicans. I mean you, Harold Meyerson, who published an op-ed in the Washington Post advocating a bait and switch: run on health care and education and then take up impeachment after the election. It is now after the election. I mean you, Arianna Huffington, who argued that impeachment would distract from the election and could be addressed later. It’s later now. And before you start whimpering about the 2008 elections looming, consider this….

A democracy that limits itself to elections will die. A democracy that appears like Brigadoon for a day every two years and then becomes a dictatorship for 729 days is dead. Citizen activism begins today, November 8th. We have a moral duty to impeach and distant elections be damned. But, even so, consider this…

In each of the nine cases in the past when one party has raised impeachment, that party has benefitted in the next elections. In other cases when a party has failed to press for impeachment when the grounds for it were widely known, that party has suffered. (Remember Iran Contra?) And look at what just happened yesterday.

Exit polls reported that voters by a margin of 62 – 33 percent voted on national, not local, issues. They voted for four, closely bunched, national reasons: corruption, terrorism, the economy, and Iraq. By 57 – 41 percent they disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq. They didn't give a damn about taxes or "values" or local pork.

Every state except Arizona that voted on proposals to discriminate against gay people voted yes. South Dakotans rejected a ban on abortion. Voters in six more states restored some lost value to the minimum wage. But there's no evidence that any of these issues drove voters' choices of candidates. There is abundant evidence that voters were driven by opposition to the war and – probably more so – to Bush and Cheney.

Impeachment supporter Keith Ellison won a seat from Minnesota as the first Muslim in Congress by speaking out for accountability. Progressive candidates backed by Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) who spoke out against the war and for accountability, and who won, include Sherrod Brown, John Hall, and Jerry McNerney. Some will recall that PDA backed promising antiwar candidate Christine Cegalis in the Democratic primaries, and that the DCCC imported a candidate from out of state and dumped a ton of cash on her to squeak out a win: pro-war Tammy Duckworth. Yesterday she lost.

The rest of the article is at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/15346