Yesterday, as promised, Dennis Kucinich introduced a privileged resolution to the floor of the House of Representatives to impeach Dick Cheney. Kucinich has explained that he decided to bring the resolution now because the danger that Cheney would lie to justify a preemptive war against Iran is high. He read the full text of the resolution on the House floor. The resolution is similar to HR333, which he introduced in April, but has languished in the Judiciary Committee ever since. HR333 has 22 cosponsors now, the latest being Democratic Representative Danny Davis.

The resolution introduced yesterday indicts Cheney for having lied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that the Iraq government had worked closely with al-Qaeda. The resolution also accuses Cheney of violating the US Constitution by threatening to use force against Iran, when Iran poses no threat to the US.

Although Nancy Pelosi was not visibly present on the floor of the House during the entire procedure, once the resolution was introduced, House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md) made a motion at her behest to table, i.e., kill the resolution. Echoing Pelosi, who has repeatedly said that impeachment is “off the table” Hoyer told Fox News: “Impeachment is not on our agenda, We have some major priorities. We need to focus on those.”

Initially it looked as if the motion to table would easily succeed. At one point in the voting it had 290 votes. However, a decision was made by the Republican leadership to instruct party members to change their votes and vote against tabling the measure. The final vote was 251 against tabling to 162 in favor of tabling. 165 Republicans voted against tabling, as did 86 Democrats, with at least 17 Democrats also changing their votes at the very end to also vote against tabling the motion in clear defiance of Pelosi.

With this vote, the impeachment of Dick Cheney is clearly no longer “off the table” as Nancy Pelosi has insisted. Her protection of Cheney’s war policy has been thoroughly unmasked.

Next, Hoyer moved to refer the resolution to the Judiciary Committee. The procedural vote as to whether to vote on the motion to refer to committee succeeded by a margin of 218 to 194, with the Republicans once again voting against Hoyer in order to force a quick one-hour debate on the house floor.

The actual motion to refer to committee won by the same margin 218 to 194.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 9:17 am and is filed under Cheney, Politics, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.