"Editorial: Talking about impeachment" Across The Political Spectrum

[kpete]

Editorial: Talking about impeachment

A Cap Times editorial
December 30, 2005


The dwindling circle of right-wing defenders of the Bush-Cheney presidency would have Americans believe that only the most reckless partisans would even consider the prospect of censuring or perhaps even impeaching the president and vice president. But the prospect of officially sanctioning Bush and Cheney, as has now been proposed by U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is gaining ground in unexpected quarters.

Nation magazine editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel argues that, as 2005 gives way to 2006, the outrage level is rising. "The I-word," writes vanden Heuvel, "has moved from the marginal to the mainstream." Editor & Publisher magazine, the journal of the newspaper industry, agrees, pointing out that a "sudden outbreak of anger or candor has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House-approved domestic spying program."

Indeed, the outbursts of anger and candor that once came only from the left are now coming from across the political spectrum from one of the nation's most respected academics, from a courageous former White House aide, from a conservative business journal, and from a growing number of Wisconsinites.

The academic is Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University School of Law professor who is widely recognized as one of the nation's most learned experts on civil liberties and surveillance issues. Turley says that, with his decision to have the National Security Agency secretly wiretap the phones of American citizens, the president not only "violated federal law" but raised "serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors."
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/editorial/index.php?ntid=66890