The corporate media are disgracing themselves even further, if that is possible, on the impeachment story.



On Thursday, three more members of Congress signed on to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney (H Res 333), bringing the total number of co-sponsors of the bill to 10. That in itself would be national news, but there is more to it than simple numbers. The new sponsors include two freshman, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, who ran for office calling for impeachment, and Hank Johnson, who took over the seat of pro-impeachment Rep. Cynthia McKinney (McKinney filed her own bill of impeachment against President Bush in the waning days of the last Congress), but the group also includes Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA).



What makes McDermott significant is that he is a senior member of the Washington state delegation to Congress, a 9th-term legislator with considerable clout in Congress who sits on the House Ways and Means and Judiciary Committees, who chairs the subcommittee on income security and family support, and who has, in the past, said he was opposed to impeachment. While most of the other nine co-sponsors of H Res 333 were also among the group of 39 representatives who last year had signed on to Rep. John Conyers’ bill in the last Congress calling for creation of a special committee to investigate possible impeachable crimes by the administration, McDermott was never a backer.



In a related development, Kucinich’s bill, which was filed back on April 24, amid an almost complete news blackout, and which has languished for over two months, with the House Judiciary Committee, headed by Conyers (D-MI) taking no action on it, suddenly was referred this week to a Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, chaired by US Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)—a sign that it will be taken up by the full Judiciary Committee.





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