Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Why isn’t impeachment gaining more traction?

Bruce Fein, once a young lawyer in President Nixon's Justice Department and decades later co-author of the articles of impeachment against President Clinton, was headed over to a Senate office building this summer when he received the news:

The White House's attorney was refusing to let former counselor Harriet Miers and another aide testify before congressional investigators concerning internal conversations about the firing of U.S. attorneys.

Fein fumed. Even Nixon didn't try to stop his counsel , John Dean , from testifying in the Senate Watergate hearings - and perhaps he should have. Dean captivated the nation in 1973 when he detailed Oval Office conversations implicating Nixon in Watergate, leading to his impeachment.

For Fein, the refusal to let Miers testify was another bad day in what he has called his summer of discontent - a summer in which he decided that President Bush should be impeached.

Polls show that one-third of Americans want the same - even more in some surveys. That's as much if not more public support than existed to impeach President Clinton in the early days of Monicagate.

Public support for impeachment has grown from 26 percent in a Newsweek poll taken in March 2006 to 36 percent this July in a USA Today/Gallup Poll.

One poll this summer put support as high as 45 percent, but experts are skeptical when one survey diverges so greatly.

Former Republican Rep. Bob Barr, a leader during Clinton's impeachment, told an interviewer this summer on the conservative Web site HumanEvents.com: "I'm not sure we ever really had hard polling numbers in favor of impeachment that were this high."

Across the country, nearly a dozen Web sites are devoted to impeaching Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. One group claims to have collected a million petitioners. Impeachment has its own color: orange (wear it if you're in favor). Go to social networking sites and find an instant impeachment community - like the one now forming in Henderson.

Last month 125 impeachment rallies were held across the nation. More are being held this weekend.

But ask about it in Washington and you get a blank stare, a disdainful reply. To insiders, it's not even worthy of a story. Pollster Charles E. Cook of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report told the Sun that "only the wackos are pushing" impeachment. Others interviewed for this story said about the same.

Their reason is that impeachment is essentially a dead issue in Washington, orphaned, without a powerful patron in Congress or the attention of the Washington news corps.

The Democrats running Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, have said for more than a year that they have no interest in launching impeachment proceedings. Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has introduced legislation to impeach Cheney, but it has gone nowhere.

So what to make of it?

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton who has written extensively about Congress and the presidency, said as with any issue out of the mainstream in Washington, unless it reaches a tipping point, lawmakers are unlikely to budge.

"Sometimes the threshold is unpredictable - it could be one story that changes the nature of the debate," Zelizer said. "I don't think people in Washington are missing this - either they don't think it's worth it or the public support isn't there yet.

"Democrats will have to see half this country want impeachment to make it go."

Sitting in an office just off the Senate chamber last fall, Reid drew a sketch of what Democrats would do if they won the majority of congressional seats, which they did in November: raise the minimum wage, reduce the country's oil dependence and, most important , change the course of the war in Iraq.

Impeachment was off the table, he told the Sun.

Pelosi said as much in May 2006 after the Republican Party launched ads warning voters that if they sent Democrats to power an impeachment circus would follow.

Democrats made a wise political choice, say historians and pundits, who think the party has much to risk and little to gain from dragging the country through impeachment hearings with a war going on and 15 months left of the Bush presidency.

Pollster Cook says Democrats understand the political trouble such hearings would cause their moderate lawmakers, and the boon it would be to Republican fundraising. Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterm election in large part because of backlash over their efforts to impeach Clinton.

Besides, of the more than 80 communities that have passed resolutions supporting impeachment proceedings, nearly half are in liberal Vermont - hardly a groundswell. None is in Nevada. (In 2004 the state Democratic Party passed a measure of support for impeachment.)

Even the left is divided on the issue, worried an impeachment fight would detract from efforts to end the war. Move On.org, the powerful liberal group that has led the nation's antiwar movement, was targeted this spring by key impeachment leaders for not using its clout on impeachment. (Move On.org was founded in 1998 to "move on" from the Clinton impeachment to more pressing issues facing the nation.)

"You couldn't make GOP leaders happier than to have articles of impeachment drawn up and debated in the House," Cook said.

Former Republican Rep. Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's overreach of executive authority, said Friday that "the people who are pushing the impeachment are doing exactly the wrong thing."

Activists instead should focus on pushing Congress to investigate the president, even ordering the Capitol Police to haul witnesses to hearings, said Edwards, who was a member of the Republican leadership in Congress and is now a lecturer at Princeton University.

"What they should be doing is pressing the Congress to get off the dime and not take no for an answer," Edwards said.

But impeachment proponents will tell you their efforts extend beyond their bitter discontent with the Bush presidency. It's as much as anything an issue about future presidents.

Fein and others make the case that constitutional rights are at stake as the Bush administration has accumulated executive powers that cry out for oversight by Congress. Impeachment, they argue, would persuade future presidents to adhere more closely to the Constitution.

They point to a long list of grievances: the military's use of torture in violation of international law. Secret eavesdropping on Americans without proper court approvals. The indefinite imprisonment of terror suspects, including Americans, in violation of habeus corpus. The misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the war.

In a PBS show that aired in July, Fein, a conservative, and John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for the left-leaning The Nation, argue that impeachment shouldn't be regarded as a loaded concept. They say the founding fathers expected Congress to use it as a tool any time the executive overreached, as the framers of the Constitution expected presidents would.

The show, Bill Moyers' Journal, was so popular the network rebroadcast it several weeks later. In the impeachment movement, the show quickly became legendary.

"It's about more than just Bush and Cheney," said Peter Thottam, a former Green Party candidate for Congress from Southern California who in July opened the National Impeachment Center in Los Angeles, which hopes to be a model for satellite centers across the nation. "It's about the tool kit Bush and Cheney have put together for the executive branch of government. If we don't challenge that now, whoever comes in 2008 - it will be established."

At the offices of the Pew Research Center in Washington, Scott Keeter's in box gets jammed up every so often with hundreds of e-mails asking him to poll on impeachment.

Pew and other pollsters say they have never seen anything like it - the impeachment movement is pleading for a clear assessment of its numbers.

Keeter said there's a lively debate in the polling community about whether to ask the question, but Pew has declined. The issue does not appear to be concrete enough, Keeter said, and the organization is loath to query Americans on a topic that hasn't matured in the public discourse in a way that gives respondents enough information to form opinions.

That said, he added that his neighbor has an "Impeach Them Both" sign in his yard.

The media's reluctance to take on the issue earned a cover story last month in the magazine published by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

"The Media Dare Not Speak Its Name," reads the headline above a photo of 1,500 protesters spelling out the word "IMPEACH" on a sandy beach in San Francisco this year.

"The major media are simply missing the mark on impeachment," journalist Cynthia L. Cooper wrote.

But Tom Rosenstiel , of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, said the press follows issues on the national agenda and, like politicians, is unlikely to take up a crusade on behalf of 30 percent of the population.

"The press isn't covering it because it's not going to happen," Rosenstiel said.

Without doubt, Americans are tired of President Bush. A Newsweek poll at the start of this year showed 58 percent just want this presidency to be over. It's a sentiment pollsters call executive fatigue - we're just tired of the White House playing such a dramatic role in our lives.

And that was before Bush's prime time address last week announcing that American troops will remain in Iraq in an unpopular campaign long after he's gone from office in 2009.

During the PBS interview, Nichols told Moyers that he has traveled the country and thinks "people don't want to let this go."

Fein adds that Watergate didn't start with a bang, either, but rather was a slowly building story that Americans could watch unfold through the course of congressional hearings. That's why he was upset Miers and others were being blocked from testifying.

Even though Congress is holding more oversight hearings now under Democrats than at any other time in the Bush administration, he said the questions are not getting answered as openly today as they did during Watergate.

Fein doesn't see a shift in public debate any time soon. "As long as Congress permits the president to hide, it's hard to get the public aroused, " he said. "People don't know and Congress isn't taking the lead."