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CALLING NANCY PELOSI
The People's Case for Impeaching Bush
By Elizabeth Holtzman | November 15, 2006 (page 1/3)
Impeachment is an essential tool for preserving democracy. The framers of our Constitution, determined to provide protections against grave abuses of power by a president, created the impeachment process as a special procedure for citizens. Through their representatives, citizens would be able to remove a president run amok.
Our founders created a new form of government that was designed to preserve liberty by breaking up power among three co-equal branches of government and instituting a system of checks and balances. But they worried deeply about presidential misconduct. Left unchallenged, it could be "fatal to the Republic," said James Madison. The new democracy needed the ability to remove a president, if necessary.
Impeachment is the first step of a two-step process that can result in the removal of a president from office. The House of Representatives first decides whether to charge the president with impeachable offenses. If a majority of the House votes to impeach, articles of impeachment, which contain the charges, are forwarded to the Senate. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over a trial in the Senate, and if two-thirds of the senators vote for conviction, the president is removed from office.
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President Bush has committed a great many grave and dangerous offenses, and subverted the Constitution. The evidence is clear and strong. Congress cannot shirk its responsibility to protect the nation from tyranny. This is what the founders of this country intended when they added presidential impeachment to the Constitution. <MORE>
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20061115impeachment_1.cfm