Please write a LTTE regarding impeachment editorial

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http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1191023703129560.xml&coll=7

From the Portland Oregonian, Saturday September 29, 2007

The emptiness of impeachment

Some foes of the administration are driving down a dead end, and demanding that others go along for the ride Saturday, September 29, 2007
Y ou can see why Oregonians dismayed at the war in Iraq and the presidential power philosophy of the Bush administration would be looking for a quick fix. It's harder to understand the rising obsession with impeachment, which would fix neither.

Over the past weeks, four local Democratic congressmen -- Sen. Ron Wyden, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Rep. Peter DeFazio and Washington Rep. Brian Baird -- have been besieged at town halls by groups calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, or both. At Blumenauer's event, some speakers denounced impeachment as too mild, insisting that the president should be tried for criminal offenses, demanding that Blumenauer take his bow tie to the barricades.

We have been increasingly critical of the Bush administration's refusal to reconsider its failing policies in Iraq, and consistently upset at its rapacious expansion of the powers of the presidency. We have repeatedly criticized the administration's ignoring the rules of electronic surveillance, defending torture and using signing statements to declare itself above any congressionally passed laws it dislikes. But demands for impeachment are a pointless and self-indulgent escape from facing political reality. They're the 2007 version of the 2000 Ralph Nader campaign.

First, as several of the Northwest politicians gently tried to explain to their audiences, it's not going to happen. There is minimal interest in the idea in Congress, none whatever among Republicans, and little among Democrats from places outside the east side of Portland or the San Francisco Bay Area. When Wyden tried to explain this to his audience, a voice demanded how he knew that unless he tried -- a touching cry, but no reason to tie up Congress pointlessly for weeks.

It's true that in 1999, Republicans with a smaller House majority managed to impeach Bill Clinton, an effort that predictably went nowhere in the Senate. It has not generally been considered a display deserving emulation.

But beyond political realities, there are serious questions whether impeachment is an appropriate response. The Iraq war may be misguided and mismanaged, but while some readers may disagree, it's hardly clear that it's illegal, at least by American law. It was congressionally authorized, however awkward that may now be for some who voted for that, and has been funded by Congress ever since.

Even if you think the president has been dishonest in his arguments for the war, it's hardly clear that deception is an impeachable offense. If it were, history's line of trials would be much longer than it is. Many of the administration's overmuscular power claims should have been challenged by the other branches of government, the way checks and balances are supposed to work. For years, Congress has waived its own oversight responsibilities, and it's taken a long time to reach judicial findings such as recent rebukes to the USA Patriot Act in New York and Portland.

But failure or slowness in other branches doesn't bring impeachment into play. In offering a definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors," activists should try for one that attracts other Americans, rather than alienates them. Insistent cries for impeachment by small minorities have the potential to derail the debate we should be having. Already, candidates for the U.S. Senate in Oregon are raising the issue.

(snip)

There is a certain wing of politics in the United States that's less about reality and the actual world than about how it feels to take the position.

We've seen how this works in foreign policy. It doesn't work any better with the Constitution.

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Wrong on SO MANY LEVELS!