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The Hunt for Cheney: 'A Waste of Time' Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com The hunt for the head of Vice President Dick Cheney is nothing new, but despite greater visibility in the media of late, the effort to impeach the second-in-command continues to lack momentum where it counts.
On April 24, 2007, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, a candidate for the presidency, introduced House Resolution 333 to impeach Cheney. As of the most recent count, the controversial resolution had but 14 co-sponsors formally signed on.
Democratic Opposition When Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., offered an amendment to de-fund Cheney's office after stories emerged about Cheney snubbing disclosure laws on intelligence matters — citing himself as not a part of the executive branch — the novel move petered out. Two dozen Democrats opposed the Emanuel amendment.
In 2002, in an unprecedented move against a sitting vice president, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, filed a federal court suit challenging Cheney's refusal to hand over documents related to national energy policy.
In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's argument that it has a constitutional right to keep the workings of the Cheney Energy Task Force secret. However, the Court refused to rule on whether Vice President Cheney must produce documents and sent the case back to the court of appeals.
More recently, Cheney's office came under fire from the left for refusing to comply with an executive order governing the handling of classified information for the past four years and tried to abolish the office that sought to enforce those rules.
In one case after another, the vice president has managed to keep at bay a hail of slings and arrows — and the impeachment move seems destined to follow the pattern.
Story Continues Below
Although more than half of all Americans support bringing articles of impeachment against Cheney, according to a recent poll by the New Hampshire-based American Research Group, the one key figure who could push the black-ball process down the road has dug in her high heels. Even before the Democratic victories in 2006 that returned her party to majority status, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pledged that impeachment of President George W. Bush (and, by implication, his vice president) was off the table.
Pelosi: A 'Waste of Time'
Pelosi speculated on CBS' "60 Minutes" that Republicans would "just love" the "waste of time" such proceedings would be. "Making them lame ducks," she concluded, "is good enough for me." Pelosi repeated her pledge to her caucus members. But Pelosi is destined not to rest comfortably with her decision. Even though there is less than a couple of years left to go for the Bush administration, the issue will not go away quietly.
Leading the current charge is ImpeachCheney.org, which has just launched a video and Web campaign spelling out the case for impeachment against Cheney.
"Vice President Cheney misled the American people into war in Iraq and is attempting to mislead us into war with Iran. He regularly disregards the Constitution and the laws that make this country great," says Brave New Films director Robert Greenwald, who is responsible for the site.
The site features a three minute YouTube video outlining what it says are the Vice President's crimes and asking the public to call on Congress to support a House resolution to impeach Cheney.
The charges in the video roughly follow some of the detailed counts laid forth in Kucinich's impeachment resolution:
No Fault Found The former commander of Central Command, now retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks, has consistently denigrated such charges, saying in his book and in an exclusive interview with NewsMax that he read the same pre-Iraq invasion briefings as the president and vice president and reached the same dire conclusions as the civilian leadership.
Franks always buttresses his view with the stipulation that he is wholly bipartisan — having long been on the record an independent.
Unconvinced, however, is the seemingly ubiquitous Cindy Sheehan, who has come out of a retirement of sorts to place pressure on Pelosi to revisit the impeachment of both the president and vice president.
Sheehan, who became a leading anti-war activist after her son died in Iraq, has threatened that she will run against Pelosi for her San Francisco seat if the Democratic leader fails to seek the ouster of President George W. Bush by July 23.
Sheehan, whose Army hero son Casey died in combat in Iraq in 2004, told Reuters that July 23 is the date when Sheehan and a group of supporters are due to arrive in Washington as part of a cross-country caravan and walking trip for humanity that set out from Bush's hometown of Crawford, Texas, on Tuesday.
"If Nancy Pelosi doesn't support articles of impeachment . . . by the time we get there, then I will announce my candidacy against her," she said.
Rep. Filner, D-Calif., recently confirmed to the Atlanta Progressive News that he is one of the co-sponsors of House Resolution 333. "These guys have governed with cynicism and complete contempt of the American people from the beginning," Filner said.
"For political reasons impeachment was taken off the table," Filner added. "Impeachment they [Party leaders] think is a fringe idea. We're too responsible for that. A judgment I think is wrong," Filner said.
However, even the volatile Filner falls short of saying Pelosi should put impeachment back on the table, noting that he thought it was getting close to the end of Bush's term and impeachment proceedings might serve only as a distraction. "We should put on the table a much more direct confrontation of the war," he advised.
Also eschewing the "I" word recently is House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., who recently sparred over the issue with ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Conyers lambasted the administration's stonewalling a request for documents about the U.S. attorney firings, saying, "We're hoping that as the cries for the removal of both Cheney and Bush now reach 46 percent and 58 percent, respectively, for impeachment that we could begin to become a little bit more cooperative, if not amicable, in trying to get to the truth of these matters."
Stephanopoulos followed up with, "But I'm surprised you put impeachment on the table there. Are you open to pursuing that?"
Conyers immediately qualified, "I didn't put impeachment on the table. I was just telling you that 46 percent of the American people polled want Bush impeached, and 58 percent want Cheney impeached . . ."
As to the pundits and their take, Don Frederick and Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times recently quipped in a commentary: "While the Impeach Cheney folks have as much chance of success as, say, Sam Brownback does of packing the moving van for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the movement — 14 U.S. Representatives have signed on — reflects deep bitterness on the left toward the vice president. And at this stage of the White House tenure, it's all about legacy."
No Evidence
Meanwhile, James Ridgeway, the Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, opined: "since Cheney's actions could be viewed as expressions for opinion and matters of judgment, impeachable offences might be difficult to show; in addition, the actual decisions were made by Bush, not Cheney."
Ridgeway's analysis is bolstered when examining the shopping list of Cheney trespasses that can be found at "Iraq on the Record," a searchable collection of 237 "misleading" statement made by the Bush administration officials about the Iraq threat.
Prepared at the direction of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., a typical Cheney-specific example does indeed smack of matters of judgment: "Al-Qaida had a base of operation there up in northeastern Iraq where they ran a large poisons factory for attacks against Europeans and U.S. forces" (Source: Richard B. Cheney Delivers Remarks at a Bush-Cheney 2004 Fund-Raiser, White House 10/5/2003).
"This statement was misleading because it suggested that Iraq was providing support to al-Qaida. In fact, the U.S. intelligence community had conflicting evidence on this issue and was divided regarding whether there was an operational relationship. The statement also refers to al-Qaida in northeastern Iraq without acknowledging that this area was not controlled by Saddam Hussein."
Whether such ammunition qualifies as the "high crimes and misdemeanors" envisioned by the Constitution is not obvious.
Editor's note:
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