By Dave Lindorff

On Monday last week, something important happened in Washington.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic representative from Cleveland, OH,

who early in the primary season won some of the biggest applause lines

in the Democratic presidential candidate debates, introduced 35

articles calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush for

high crimes and misdemeanors.

You'd be excused if you didn't know this happened. There was almost

no reporting on the event that day or the next, which took several

hours to accomplish, along with several hours Tuesday for to be read

into the Congressional Record. Kucinich's address to the House was

broadcast live on C-Span. But it was not announced in advance or

highlighted on the C-Span website, and there were not many news reports

on the historically significant fact that articles of impeachment had

been filed against the president during subsequent days.

A week later, it has still not been reported in the New York Times,

the nation’s self-described “newspaper of record,” even though the

Times had just days before Rep. Kucinich’s action, editorialized about

the enormity of the president’s lies in tricking the country into

invading Iraq—one of the crimes leading Rep. Kucinich’s long list.

A number of papers did editorialize against impeachment, including

the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Florida Sun Sentinel—but it says

something that these publications thought it more important to attack

Rep. Kucinich’s action than to actually report on it as a news item.

Even the Washington Post’s news report was an example more of the

sclerotic state of American journalism than of genuine reporting. It

began:

“Having failed in efforts to impeach Vice President Cheney, Rep.

Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) escalated his battle against the

administration this week by introducing 35 articles of impeachment

against President Bush, using a parliamentary maneuver that will

probably force a vote today.”

Any journalism student who wrote a lede like Post staff writer Ben

Pershing’s in a classroom exercise would have gotten a “D” or an “F”

for it. Talk about backing into a story! First of all, Kucinich hasn’t

“failed” in his effort to impeach Cheney. Congress has failed to

impeach our criminal vice president and regent. Technically, Kucinich’s

Cheney impeachment bill is still lodged in the House Judiciary

Committee, where it is now joined in political limbo by the Ohio

congressman’s new Bush impeachment measure.

The unwillingness of the nation’s news media to seriously consider

the need for Congress to respond to and challenge the president’s clear

abuses of power—even as they themselves condemn of those abuses of

power—is a blot on the journalistic profession perhaps worse, and of

more lasting consequence, than their failure to act as watchdogs and

critics during the run-up to the Iraq War, when they acted more as

patriotic cheerleaders than as news organizations.

As impeachment advocates, including Rep. Kucinich, have pointed out,

unless this president and vice president are impeached by the current

Congress, any—and probably every—future president will feel empowered

by unchallenged precedent to ignore laws passed by the Congress, to go

to war without Congressional approval, to spy on Americans in violation

of the law, to ignore court orders, to abrogate international treaties,

and to lie to Congress and the American people. Unless Congress asserts

its rights under Article I, it will no longer even be a co-equal branch

of government, but instead will have been reduced to nothing more than

a debating society.

Editorialists, while refusing to honestly report on this

Constitutional crisis, have been parroting the claim of gutless and

calculating Democratic Party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in

saying that with the nation at war and with a critical election

approaching, there are “more pressing” matters to consider than

impeachment, and that impeachment would be a “diversion.”

This is nonsense. As hundreds of American troops continue to die

each quarter in a war that never should have happened, and that was

launched five years ago and continued for half a decade thanks to

administration lies and deception, there is nothing more important

facing this nation than restoring Constitutional government and

Constitutional checks and balances—something that can only be done

through the Constitutional process of impeachment.

The American people instinctively know this. In polls, fully half or

more of the public consistently continue to say, even at this late

date, that they want the president impeached. Considering the media

blackout on the issue, this is truly astonishing and even heartening.

But it will take more than polls to get impeachment rolling. The public

needs to start demanding that its representatives take action, on pain

of being voted out of office.

I was at an anti-war forum in New Jersey last Friday evening

sponsored by a group of peace activists calling themselves the Iraq

Forum Organizing Team. When forum panelist Rep. Rob Andrews was asked

by an audience member whether he favored impeachment and supported Rep.

Kucinich’s articles of impeachment, Andrews fudged. He claimed,

ingenuously, that the articles had been sent to the House Judiciary

Committee for hearings, and said that he personally thought that Bush

had committed an impeachable “high crime” by outing the identity of a

covert agent of the CIA, Valerie Plame, and added that if the Judiciary

Committee “develops a bunch of evidence” to support that charge, he

would vote to impeach.

As I pointed out to the congressman, he certainly knows that that is

a cheap dodge. I said that he was well aware that the way legislation

moves forward in Congress is that members like himself sign on as

co-sponsors of legislation they favor, and that then, and only then,

those measures get hearings. Without co-sponsors, bills go to committee

to be killed by inaction, which is the intention of sending Kucinich’s

articles of impeachment to the committee. I said if Rep. Andrews were

honestly to believe that the president might have committed any high

crimes, he should either file articles of impeachment himself, or

co-sign the excellent set of articles already filed by Rep. Kucinich.

Instead, Andrews, like the rest of the Democrats and Republicans in the

House, with the notable exception of Rep. Wexler and California Reps.

Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, have avoided Kucinich’s articles like the

plague.

The audience loudly applauded this condemnation of Rep. Andrews.

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