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By John Nichols
Cindy Sheehan and I will travel Vermont this weekend, stopping in towns from Burlington to Brattleboro, to talk about why we think the president and vice president should be impeached — and the essential role that Vermonters are playing in the process. We come not to tell the people of Vermont how to vote on warrant articles regarding impeachment at their town meetings next week. That would be not just presumptuous but foolish. Frankly, the voters who have given America George Aiken, Ralph Flanders, Robert Stafford, Jim Jeffords, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders do not need any advice from us about how to make political choices.
Rather, we come to celebrate the wisdom of Dan DeWalt, Ellen Tenney and the thousands of other Vermonters who have chosen to embrace a Jeffersonian vision of how Americans relate to their federal government, and to take some of that wisdom back to the rest of the country.
It was Thomas Jefferson who observed more than two hundred years ago that, “Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic.”
It was Jefferson, as well, who asked of those who would inherit that republic: “But will they keep it?”
The answer to that question, for this particular moment in history,
will come from the Vermont town meetings that debate calls for the
impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. No, decisions made in
town meetings across the Green Mountain State will not, in and of
themselves, restore the republic — which, rather than the punishment of
individual men, is the purpose of impeachment. But, as Americans in towns
and cities across this great country despair at the determination of
their president to surge the country deeper into the quagmire that is
Iraq and react with horror at courtroom revelations about the manner in
which their vice president has used his office to manage attacks on the
reputations and livelihoods of an administration critic and his spouse,
Vermont can signal to the nation that there is an appropriate response
to the crisis.
More importantly, Vermont can put that response — impeachment — back
on the table for use by the American people and their Congress. The
attention to the votes cast by Vermonters will remind Americans that the
founders did not intend for the people or their representatives to
allow any president or vice president to act as “a king for four years.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was wrong to suggest, as she did during the
heat of last fall’s election campaign, that impeachment was “off the
table.”
No section of the Constitution can or should be rendered inoperable by
any politician — even a well-intentioned one.
The Constitution does not belong to the politicians. It belongs to all
of us. And the medicines it prescribes for the ailments of the body
politic are ours to administer.
Indeed, Jefferson argued that all power must ultimately rest with the
people, believing that citizens at the grassroots would always be better
suited than politicians in Washington to recognize the point at which
friends of the republic must defend its democratic aspirations and the
rule of law that underpins them. “It behooves our citizens to be on
their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in
themselves,” the author of the Declaration of Independence explained. “We
are able to preserve our self-government if we will but think so.”
Jefferson believed that the process of impeachment would at times begin
outside of Washington, with petitions from the states. His manual for
the conduct of Congress, written in 18OO and adhered to today, mandates
that Congress must accept such petitions and give them due
consideration. Hence, the votes cast at town meetings across Vermont next week can
extend beyond symbolism. If the Vermont legislature responds to the
message from the voters by conveying to Congres articles of impeachment,
as several legislators have suggested it should, the struggle to hold
the president and vice president to account will have been advanced. If
Vermont’s representative in the U.S. House, Peter Welch, chooses to so
respond, he can introduce articles of impeachment incorporating language
from the resolutions adopted at Vermont’s town meetings.
As the mother of a slain soldier who has proven that one person can
confront the most powerful man in the world and be heard, and as an author
who has spent a lifetime examining the interplay between people and
power, we come to Vermont to say that the impeachment process really can
begin in the town halls and community centers of this state.
And, we will argue, this is exactly as the founders intended.
The authors of the American experiment had a deep and healthy distrust
of concentrated power, especially when that power was held by a regal
figure, be he identified as king or president. They crafted a
Constitution that made no mention of God, corporations or political parties. They
made no effort to establish a process for nominating candidates for the
presidency, and gave only the barest outlines for the selection of the
commander-in-chief — an electoral college was established, but little
preparation was made for how or when the electors would be chosen, let
alone who would do the choosing.
The founders figured that the American people would figure out how to
choose their leaders.
They feared, however, that after the selection process was done,
Americans would forget that they have the power — and, indeed, the
responsibility — to remove executives who transgress against not just the law
but the rule of law. The oath that the president and vice president take
binds them to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the
United States.” A failure to do so, as identified by the people and acted
upon by their elected representatives, forms the basis for sound
articles of impeachment.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney have, with their manipulation
of intelligence in a scheme to launch an unnecessary preemptive war,
with their repeated refusals to cooperate with a Congress that is
supposed to serve as a coequal branch of government, with their assaults on
scientific inquiry in order to prevent a fact-based discussion of global
warming by that Congress and the American people, with their violations
of laws that prevent presidents from ordering secret spying on the
American people, and with their abuses of positions of public trust to
punish critics of the administration’s policies have failed to “preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
They have created a Constitutional crisis.
Now, it is suggested that those who would address the crisis with the
tools afforded them by the founders are doing harm to the political
process and perhaps the nation. The claim that impeachment represents a
dangerous diversion from the work of nations is at odds with everything we
know and love about our country.
No less an American than James Madison said, after assuring that the
Constitution would include a broad authority to sanction members of the
executive branch, observed that “… it may, perhaps, on some occasion,
be found necessary to impeach the President himself…” The occasion
has arrived. The necessary arguments for the impeachment of the president
— and the vice president — have been identified. That Vermonters are
among the first to recognize the circumstance does not surprise us.
Rather, it inspires us. This is why we have come: to share in a great
democratic moment, and to carry the faith forward to other Americans in
other states. It is the faith of the founders, a faith that is being
restored by the people of Vermont.
—
John Nichols, the author of The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’
Cure for Royalism [The New Press], and Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was
killed in Iraq and who has attracted international attention with her
anti-war activism, will appear in close to a dozen Vermont towns Friday,
Saturday and Sunday to take part in rallies, forums and discussions
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