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April 22, 2006

Bush Impeachment - The Illinois State Legislature is Preparing to Drop a Bombshell
Utilizing a little known rule of the US House to bring Impeachment charges
by Steven Leser


http://www.opednews.com


Steven Leser

The Illinois General Assembly is about to rock the nation. Members of state legislatures are normally not considered as having the ability to decide issues with a massive impact to the nation as a whole. Representative Karen A. Yarbrough of Illinois' 7th District is about to shatter that perception forever. Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature. From there, Illinois House Joint Resolution 125 (hereafter to be referred to as HJR0125) was born.

Detailing five specific charges against President Bush including one that is specified to be a felony, the complete text of HJR0125 is copied below at the end of this article. One of the interesting points is that one of the items, the one specified as a felony, that the NSA was directed by the President to spy on American citizens without warrant, is not in dispute. That fact should prove an interesting dilemma for a Republican controlled US House that clearly is not only loathe to initiate impeachment proceedings, but does not even want to thoroughly investigate any of the five items brought up by the Illinois Assembly as high crimes and/or misdemeanors. Should HJR0125 be passed by the Illinois General Assembly, the US House will be forced by House Rules to take up the issue of impeachment as a privileged bill, meaning it will take precedence over other House business.

The Illinois General Assembly joins a growing chorus of voices calling for censure or impeachment of President Bush including Democratic state committees in Vermont, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada and North Carolina as well as the residents themselves of seven towns in Vermont, seventy Vermont state legislators and Congressman John Conyers. The call for impeachment is starting to grow well beyond what could be considered a fringe movement. An ABC News/Washington Post Poll Conducted April 6-9 showed that 33% of Americans currently support Impeaching President Bush, coincidentally, only a similar amount supported impeaching Nixon at the start of the Watergate investigation. If and when Illinois HJR0125 hits the capitol and the individual charges are publicly investigated, that number is likely to grow rapidly. Combined with the very real likelihood that Rove is about to be indicted in the LeakGate investigation, and Bush is in real trouble beyond his plummeting poll numbers. His cronies in the Republican dominated congress will probably save him from the embarassment of an impeachment conviction, for now, but his Presidency will be all but finished.








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HJ0125 LRB094 20306 RLC 58347 r



1 HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION


2 WHEREAS, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of
3 the United States House of Representatives allows federal
4 impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of
5 a state legislature; and

6 WHEREAS, President Bush has publicly admitted to ordering
7 the National Security Agency to violate provisions of the 1978
8 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a felony, specifically
9 authorizing the Agency to spy on American citizens without
10 warrant; and

11 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that President Bush authorized
12 violation of the Torture Convention of the Geneva Conventions,
13 a treaty regarded a supreme law by the United States
14 Constitution; and

15 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration has held American
16 citizens and citizens of other nations as prisoners of war
17 without charge or trial; and

18 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that the Bush Administration
19 has manipulated intelligence for the purpose of initiating a
20 war against the sovereign nation of Iraq, resulting in the
21 deaths of large numbers of Iraqi civilians and causing the
22 United States to incur loss of life, diminished security and
23 billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses; and

24 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration leaked classified
25 national secrets to further a political agenda, exposing an
26 unknown number of covert U. S. intelligence agents to potential
27 harm and retribution while simultaneously refusing to
28 investigate the matter; and

29 WHEREAS, The Republican-controlled Congress has declined




HJ0125 - 2 - LRB094 20306 RLC 58347 r



1 to fully investigate these charges to date; therefore, be it

2 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE
3 NINETY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, THE
4 SENATE CONCURRING HEREIN, that the General Assembly of the
5 State of Illinois has good cause to submit charges to the U. S.
6 House of Representatives under Section 603 that the President
7 of the United States has willfully violated his Oath of Office
8 to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United
9 States; and be it further

10 RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the
11 charges contained herein, should be removed from office and
12 disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.



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Steven Leser is a freelance journalist specializing in Politics, Science & Health, and Entertainment topics. He has held positions within the Democratic Party including District Chair and Public Relations Chair within county organizations. His coverage of the Ohio Presidential Recount in 2004 was distinguished by actual interviews with Carlo Loparo, spokesperson for the Ohio Secretary of State, along with Supervisors of Elections of several Ohio counties. Similar efforts on other topics to get first hand information from sources separate Mr. Leser from many of his contemporaries.

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STRATFOR WEEKLY Stratfor Weekly Archive

The GOP Strategy: Indirection and Timing
September 14, 2006 2135 GMT


By Bart Mongoven

The U.S. mid-term congressional election campaign began in earnest Sept. 8, when President George W. Bush announced the end to the CIA's secret prisons system and the transfer of 12 high-value al Qaeda suspects to detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The announcement was essentially the first significant political statement to come from a Republican Party leader in two months. Over the summer, the GOP all but watched in silence as its support numbers fell and public discussions about a Democratic takeover in one or both houses of Congress gained volume. This period of relative quiet, however, appears to have been deliberate -- part of a national strategy to help Republican candidates maintain control of the House and Senate despite Bush's low approval ratings among voters.

The GOP strategy that appears to be unfolding is one that would accept a skeletally thin majority in the House and Senate this November as a "victory," and which depends on winning a number of very close congressional races. Intriguingly, Republicans are not campaigning with any particular vigor to attract the political middle, but appear dedicated to preserving their traditional base of support (which relies heavily on the votes of national-security, social and fiscal conservatives) in such a way that does not completely alienate the middle. While they will not win a majority of the total votes cast nationally through such an approach, Republicans appear to be betting that Congressional district gerrymandering will do the rest of the work for them.

It is difficult to say at this point whether the strategy will achieve its ends, though early indicators do suggest a degree of success at this point. So far, the strategy has been only partly implemented. The portion that has become visible suggests the Republicans will use a highly indirect approach to maintain their hold on Congress, and will rely heavily on a number of players (Democrats and the media particularly) behaving in predictable ways.

There are, however, two critical issues that must be considered, and which doubtless will weigh heavily on the minds of Republican Party strategists in the coming weeks. The first is that this game plan -- even if successful for the November elections -- will not be a panacea for the larger ills the GOP faces. Second, there is the possibility that Bush -- and by extension, his party -- have grown so unpopular that 2006 could become another "tidal wave" election year, akin to 1954, 1974 and 1994. In those off-year elections, an unpopular sitting president and a sense that the nation was adrift resulted in significant political shifts and a turnover of leadership in Congress.

If 2006 should turn out to be a tidal wave year, no amount of intricate maneuvering or strategizing will be able to forestall a political shift.

The Gerrymandering Tactic

The Republican Party's requirements for November are quite simple: Capture 218 seats to retain control of the House. Most of those seats already can be viewed as safe from changing hands. Aided by computers, state legislators for years have been improving their ability to gerrymander congressional districts for Republicans and Democrats alike. According to Congressional Quarterly, only about 40 of the 435 seats in the House are truly up for grabs, and the Senate appears even safer for the party.

In light of that assumption, the GOP would not need to win a majority of total votes cast in November, but merely retain sufficient control of its own support base to win 50.1 percent of the vote in the 218 districts.

The effectiveness of gerrymandering is a critical pillar in this year's GOP strategy, and one that has been long in the making. As a result of GOP victories at the state legislature level during the 1980s and 1990s, Republicans have been able to redraw political maps to their advantage in Congress. One of the most important, but frequently overlooked, tenets of gerrymandering holds that all of the minority party's supporters should be consolidated in as few districts as possible. This means that the opposition party will firmly control the seats for those congressional districts, but it also does much to dilute that party's strength in the other districts. Thus, it is entirely possible that minority party candidates will win their seats with high margins (frequently 75 percent of the vote) while majority party candidates have slimmer showings (often around 60 percent) -- yet, crucially, will still outnumber their opponents in Congress.

The downside, of course, is that when the majority party faces serious problems, its candidates are still facing close (and consequently, tougher) election battles and are vulnerable in the event of a political tidal wave.

A Fractured GOP Base

For the past three months, the Republican Party has engaged in only half-hearted campaigning. This appears to have been intentional; there was little good news on important issues -- such as the war in Iraq or gasoline prices -- over which they could boast, and the party's liabilities, clearly visible in the president's low approval ratings, were numerous. There are few political strategies for dealing with a confluence of bad news of this sort -- lamenting over a "national malaise" has proved an unwise tactic in the past -- but also, in the middle of the summer preceding an election, would not be necessary. For Republican candidates, the less they said, the better.

The most significant problem the party faced was the fact that its core constituencies have grown disappointed and, increasingly, disaffected. The Republicans had not delivered on issues that were important to either the fiscal conservatives or social conservatives, such as deficit spending controls or abortion. To some degree, this was a natural and expected circumstance, since the true support bases of any political party tend to comprise idealistic activists who are not prepared for the compromise that inevitably comes after winning power in Washington. Republican voters, however, have reached an unusual pitch of frustration over the failure of party leaders (particularly the president) to address economic and financial issues and, crucially, with the conduct of the war in Iraq.

Thus, the party's primary challenge now is ensuring it retains the bulk of its traditional base in November.

The Strategy: Indirection and Timing

Its efforts to do so have required the GOP to remain patient. For example, candidates by and large have refrained from discussing hot-button issues, such as immigration and stem cell research, which appeal to the base but turn off the political middle. But the most intriguing aspect of the strategy is the apparent decision to let the media and Democrats openly discuss the odds of a Democratic takeover of Congress -- rather than mobilizing the GOP base through direct appeals, as would traditionally be the case. Republicans occasionally have mused about the possibility of a "Speaker Nancy Pelosi," but rather than directly setting up a "Speaker Pelosi" as bogeyman in July and August, GOP strategists appeared content to let Democrats and the media do the work instead. Republican voters would not require statements from the leadership to the effect that Pelosi is a liberal who is out of step with their values -- nor would going into attack mode, when the party's standing was already at a low ebb, aid the GOP.

By allowing the concept to take root in the minds of Republican voters as a very real possibility, party strategists apparently hope to force their supporters to think long and hard about what really is at stake in the congressional election, rather than focusing on the president.

Two keys to this effort are timing and momentum.

Journalists like to present elections as horse races, continually analyzing who is ahead today and why they are ahead. Political strategists, however, view elections with a very different concept of time. Some have compared elections to wave action: Each campaign has its ups and downs, but the key to victory is peaking at the right time. Certainly, if a candidate can always be ahead of (or above) his opponent, that's a good thing, but the key is to be at the height of popularity come Election Day.

Momentum also is crucial. Building momentum in July, months ahead of the vote, would be meaningless -- unless a candidate entered the race at such a disadvantage that he or she needs the whole period merely to emerge as competitive by November. Momentum becomes much more important around mid-September, and emerges as critical in October. Candidates build momentum with the expectation that it will wane, and in hopes of peaking at the right moment. Sen. John Kerry was a good example of this: He won the 2004 Iowa primary, despite having placed anywhere between third and fifth in polls building up to that vote. He crested at the right moment in the primaries and then rode the momentum as the most "electable" Democrat.

Notably, candidates who emerge as front-runners early in a campaign often grow troubled as elections approach. The time they spend out in front brings intense scrutiny from the media and speculation about actions they will take once in office. The Republicans ceded the summer to the Democrats, and the media obligingly began to scrutinize the party and its leaders. Ultimately, however, a media debate in August about Rep. John Murtha's possible role in the next congressional leadership does Democrats no favors.

The Strategy in Operation

A month ago, the GOP was in the difficult position of needing to win back the support of key constituencies -- and of having to do so without appealing directly to the most idealistic party members on their own terms (which tends to alienate more moderate members and swing voters). The party's gains in polls after Labor Day weekend support the idea that at least some of the Republican base is intact, and suggest that the strategy of indirection has succeeded to some degree. For example, the president's approval rating has climbed from the mid-30 percent range, as of two months ago, to 38 percent three weeks ago, to a mediocre (but not moribund) 42 percent on Sept. 11, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll.

However, as Bush's recent speeches have signaled, the time for inaction has passed and the time for building momentum has come. The next phase of the Republican strategy will require more direct methods of shoring up the support base -- and none more critical than the national-security conservatives, who have felt the war in Iraq particularly hard (and who are being actively courted by Democrats, with the homeland security aspect of that party's campaign).

Bush's recent announcement that captured al Qaeda figures have been moved to Guantanamo Bay to await trial was designed to appeal to the national security Republicans, as was his Sept. 11 speech about the link between Iraq and the larger war against al Qaeda.

Though "national-security conservatives" traditionally could be defined as current and former members of the military and their families, it has taken on a much wider meaning since the 9/11 attacks, as more Americans have come to view politics through the single lens of al Qaeda and the terrorist threat. Current and former military members are not as likely as these others to be moved by the administration's acknowledgement, and cancellation, of secret CIA prisons.

Whoever might be swayed by it, the administration's effort seems designed to take the focus off the "war against terrorism" -- now linked in the public mind to news photos of exploded ordnance and burned-out markets in Baghdad -- and recenter it squarely on the "terrorists" against whom the war is being waged. From the GOP's standpoint, the ideal outcome would be to return the country, which has been badly fractured by the conduct of the war, to the unity that was apparent soon after the 9/11 attacks. It also sets the stage for coming congressional debates over the efficacy of controversial techniques, such as wiretapping and financial surveillance, that have been used in the war against al Qaeda and could help to frame these discussions to the party's advantage.

Looking Ahead

It is clear that the Republicans have embarked upon a highly indirect election strategy, which -- given the unpopularity of Bush, the war in Iraq and emerging, though still nebulous, concerns about the economy -- might be the national party's best bet. If enough of the GOP's traditional support base can be mobilized in November, the Republicans can hold the House.

Nevertheless, there remains a possibility that this strategy does not address -- and which it could not withstand, should it emerge as a reality: the possibility that the Democratic wave, which expanded from a ripple in May to the heights seen in August, was really the initial swell in what will become a tidal wave of general opposition to the president. If the public's distrust and dislike of Bush and his administration should spill over to congressional candidates -- making the mid-terms a referendum on Bush and Iraq -- the tsunami would wash out the significance of any polling (which so far has focused on a "ferocious 40" districts as being seriously in contention) and overwhelm the abilities of party strategists to cope.