width=”250″ Tonight a smart and determined group of impeachment activists gathered in front of the Yale Club of New York City to urge Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to hold impeachment hearings. Nadler was scheduled to speak at the annual dinner for Citizen Action of New York, one of New York’s leading progressive organizations, which does outstanding work on education, health care, and other important issues.

Nadler chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, so Dennis Kucinich’s H.Res. 333 (recently revised as H.Res. 799) is before his committee, which makes him a key player on impeachment.

I stood with the impeachment activists for a while before the event began, and the response from passers-by was mostly positive, although midtown Manhattan is not a place to encourage honking!

I bought a ticket to the dinner inside hoping to speak with Nadler on behalf of the activists outside. While Nadler arrived near the end, I did get to spend a few minutes discussing impeachment with him, although we kept getting interrupted by other guests.

I have lobbied Nadler on impeachment several times, so I did not take him by surprise and he greeted me with a friendly smile, and we covered much of the same ground. “When are you going to schedule hearings on impeachment?” I began, aiming right for the bottom line. “As a subcommittee chairman I can’t make that decision, it’s up to Chairman Conyers,” he replied.

“Besides it’s a bad idea,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “It would suck all the oxygen out of Congress, and we wouldn’t get anything else done.” I suppressed the obvious snarky answer that they weren’t getting anything else done anyway, and took a different tack: “But it’s just one subcommittee, how can that suck all the oxygen out of Congress?” “You know how the media would jump on it,” he replied. I wanted to say, “Yes and that’s good because the American people would support the impeachment effort,” but someone else pulled him aside.

[…]

I waited and gave it one more try. “Impeachment can never work, it wasn’t designed for a two-party system, that’s why we’ve never removed a President” he said. “So then we should tear up the Constitution?” I asked.

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