Impeachment Watch IV(Welcome, fellow
Ankle-Biting Pundits readers!)
This is part of a continuing series on the "reality-based" community's effort to impeach President Bush and/or Vice President Cheney.
Elizabeth Holtzman returns
to advise everybody that Bush's crimes and misdemeanors rise to the level of an impeachable offense. Holtzman was a long-ago member of the House Judiciary Committee. She's probably most familiar in the last ten years or so for her
impassioned insistence that impeachment should not be for "personal" offenses when Bill Clinton was in the crosshairs. She noted that the Judiciary Committee had declined to include a charge related to President Nixon's personal income tax returns. The nobility of Holtzman's stance was a little undercut when it was discovered that Holtzman herself had voted for Nixon's impeachment on that count.
Read Holtzman's other reasons for opposing Clinton's impeachment:
Consider how much the country will be harmed by an impeachment trial in the Senate if the House votes any articles of impeachment. The trial, which could last for months, would disrupt the workings of the Supreme Court. The chief justice will have to preside every day over the Senate trial.
It will disrupt the workings of the Senate. It will disrupt the presidency. That is one of the reasons that impeachment cannot be voted lightly. The danger to the nation of having a president remain in office must be greater than the danger caused by the wholesale disruption of our government that an impeachment trial will bring.Gee, Liz, don't those objections apply doubly today, in a time of war?
