Congress

Shades of Cold War Commies, the latest verbal assault and acting out remind me of the staged tantrum thrown by Nikita Khrushchev when he did not like what the United States and the rest of the West were doing.

I was young, but it is still vivid as Khrushchev disrupted the UN assembly as it tried to conduct debates. He yelled at the podium, pounded the table, and at one point took his shoe off and started to pound the table with it. There is a photo of him waving his shoe from the podium.

Indeed W. had shoes thrown at him in the Middle East.

Now to the health care debate where our elected representatives are having town meetings and .... what? Shades of Nikita.

Why have discourse when you can scream, shout, and carry on? If your side doesn't have an argument, shriek down the person who is trying to talk.

Much of the yelling is from the right wing, the very same group who today are following Khrushchev's approach to dealing with those he disagrees with. Ironic that those who abhorred the Reds then are following in their footsteps now.

Or as they say, the shoe is on the other foot.

The red blog says so, noting:

Not sure what "later this year" means...but I'm not sure who will attend the pity party.

Is the GOP timing for Mark Foley backlash? (Ha!) Or just another instance of a Republican acting ahead of the public radar? Health? Disgust? Fatigue?

The Senate has passed a bill that contains language to repeal the global gag rule.

So what's next for the global gag rule? It's now headed to a House-Senate "conference committee," where a few members from each chamber will work out differences between each chamber’s version of the bill. Then the Senate and House must approve the final compromise version, which will be sent to the president.

Even though we won this key vote on the global gag rule, President Bush has already threatened to veto any bill that includes a pro-choice provision, including this one.

Now you can help rally support for that language to survive to the final bill.

Of course, the problem of governments' claiming they own women's wombs is well represented within US borders, too.

Impeachment of the worst White House administration in history comes up every day in the blogosphere -- and not without its skeptics. I've been rather skeptical about it all myself. What with how the Republicans trivialized impeachment in the '90s, it's hard to take impeachment with any sort of Constitutional seriousness. (And do we really want to follow their lead, anyway?)

However, it took a Republican to convince me that the question is not at all trivial. Especially not today.

Bruce Fein was Ronald Reagan's Justice Department official, and general council to the FCC. Hardly a shill for MoveOn. And yet he made the most powerful argument for impeachment of Bush and Cheney a couple of weeks ago, on Bill Moyers Journal. And his words still haunt me.

Well, this is an unusual affair of president/vice-president, where the vice-president is de facto president most of the time. And that's why most of people recognize that these decisions, especially when it comes to overreaching with executive power, are the product of Dick Cheney and his aide, David Addington, not George Bush and Alberto Gonzalez or Harriet Miers, who don't have the cerebral capacity to think of these devilish ideas. And for that reason, they equate the administration more with Dick Cheney than with George Bush....

...It means asserting powers and claiming that there are no other branches that have the authority to question it. Take, for instance, the assertion that he's made that when he is out to collect foreign intelligence, no other branch can tell him what to do. That means he can intercept your e-mails, your phone calls, open your regular mail, he can break and enter your home. He can even kidnap you, claiming I am seeking foreign intelligence and there's no other branch Congress can't say it's illegal--judges can't say this is illegal. I can do anything I want. That is overreaching. When he says that all of the world, all of the United States is a military battlefield because Osama bin Laden says he wants to kill us there, and I can then use the military to go into your homes and kill anyone there who I think is al-Qaeda or drop a rocket, that is overreaching. That is a claim even King George III didn't make--

....Opening your mail, your e-mails, your phone calls. Breaking and entering your homes. Creating a pall of fear and intimidation if you say anything against the president you may find retaliation very quickly. We're claiming he's setting precedents that will lie around like loaded weapons anytime there's another 9/11.

Right now the victims are people whose names most Americans can't pronounce. And that's why they're not so concerned. They will start being Browns and Jones and Smiths. And that precedent is being set right now. And one of the dangers that I see is it's not just President Bush but the presidential candidates for 2008 aren't standing up and saying--

--"If I'm president, I won't imitate George Bush." That shows me that this is a far deeper problem than Mr. Bush and Cheney.

A deeper problem.

[The Democrats in Congress] have basically renounced-- walked away from their responsibility to oversee and check. It's not an option. It's an obligation when they take that oath to faithfully uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. And I think the reason why this is. They do not have convictions about the importance of the Constitution. It's what in politics you would call the scientific method of discovering political truths and of preventing excesses because you require through the processes of review and vetting one individual's perception to be checked and-- counterbalanced by another's. And when you abandon that process, you abandon the ship of state basically and it's going to capsize....

...This is something that needs to set a precedent, whoever occupies the White House in 2009. You do not want to have that occupant, whether it's John McCain or Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani or John Edwards to have this authority to go outside the law and say, "I am the law. I do what I want. No one else's view matters."

What about Bush's claim that these are extraordinary times?

Cheney and Bush have shown that these measures are optical. Take, for instance, these military conditions that combine judge, jury, and prosecutors. What have they done? They tried the same offenses that are tried in civilian courts. American Taliban John Walker Lindh got 20 years in the civilian courts. And then we have the same offense, David Hicks, he gets nine months in military prison. Why are you creating these extraordinary measures? They aren't needed....

...They're trying to create the appearance that they're tougher than all of their opponents 'cause they're willing to violate the law, even though the violations have nothing to do with actually defeating the terrorism. And we have instances where the president now for years has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Act. He's never said why the act has ever inhibited anybody....

...Certainly in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we were in a fog. There could have been hundreds of thousands terrorist cells. You could understand the president, "I've got to take any action I need right now to uncover a possible second edition of 9/11." And, of course, as soon as I do that, I will go to Congress as soon as possible. I will seek ratification. That's an immediate aftermath of 9/11. We know a lot more in 2007, in July. We know this is not 100 or 1,000 terrorist cells.

We know this is not the danger of the Soviet Union or Hirohito or the Third Reich. And yet the president continues to insist. That's why we need military commissions. We need to say you're an enemy combatant and stick you in prison forever without any judicial review and otherwise.That is a total distortion of what the genuine nature of the problem is and our ability to fight and defeat these terrorists with ordinary civil-- the criminal proceedings....

...But it's saying no, it's the Constitution that's more important than your aggrandizing of power. And not just for you because the precedent that would be set would bind every successor in the presidency as well, no matter Republican, Democrat, Independent, or otherwise.

You should really watch the video, whether you're for or against impeachment. It's quite a conversation.

This is bigger than merely enduring the last dozen-plus months of Bush/Cheney. It's about what we allow to happen to our Constitution.

Impeach.

On this day, the Democrats in Congress seem very very small, while Al Gore is like a giant.

I wish he would run. Then I would get really interested. I want to be inspired by the frontrunners. They hit the right notes, mostly, but really I feel like I'm watching a bunch of children fighting for the spotlight in the school musical.

And they have been almost inspiring so far because the Republican candidates are just so much more pathetic and stupid.

Help!