Holtzman makes case for impeaching Bush

Liz Holtzman addresses a packed house at Hudson Guild’s Fulton Community Center last Thursday evening.

By Mary Reinholz

Not long before a hard rain fell last Thursday night, at least 100 members of three local Democratic clubs entered the Hudson Guild’s Fulton Center and made their way down a ramp and into an auditorium, where they would hear former Watergate-era congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman make a case for a deluge of another kind to befall the current U.S. president, George W. Bush: that of impeachment.

Standing behind a dias and microphone at ground level in front of a large stage, Holtzman’s Brooklyn accented voice alternated between indignant, sorrowful, folksy and sardonic throughout her 40-minute delivery and Q&A session with the packed-house audience, who had come to hear her lay out her argument. The 65-year-old lawyer and newly minted author didn’t disappoint.

Holtzman started off by claiming Bush committed impeachable offenses by “repeatedly” authorizing secret wiretaps of American citizens without obtaining court orders and abused presidential power by using “lies, deceptions and exaggerations to drive the country into war in Iraq.”

As an example, she noted that Bush continually—and erroneously—claimed that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Al Quada were “in cahoots” and that the U.S. was going against Saddam as retaliation for 9/11. “The fact of the matter is that the president knew Saddam Hussein and Al Quada were not in cahoots; they were enemies,” she said. “But(Bush) repeated this so many times before the war started that a majority of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.”

She went on to note that former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke wrote in his book that he had told Bush, “No, Mr. President, Saddam Hussein was not responsible for 9/ll. Osama bin Laden was responsible,” and the President said to him, “Go back and check again.”

“So, we know the president knew the facts,” said Holtzman.

Holtzman also accused Bush of condoning torture in the prosecution of the war on terror in violation of the Geneva Convention. Bush’s conduct in these and other matters, she said, amounts to crimes and misdemeanors, one of three categories of bad acts that constitute a standard required before the House of Representatives can consider impeachment (the two others are treason and bribery).

“We’re not talking here about presidential policies or that we don’t like his clothes or the way he speaks and can’t pronounce ‘nuclear,’” said Holtzman, stirring laughter from the audience, many of whom appeared to have lived through the dark days of the Vietnam War and World War II. The grounds for impeachment, she said, “have to be grave and dangerous offenses that subvert the constitution.”

Holtzman ought to know.

She was a one-time member of the House Judiciary Committee that recommended articles of impeachment against president Richard Nixon in 1974 over the Watergate burglary and cover-up. When she was elected to congress in 1972 for the first of four terms, Holtzman was then the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. In addition, she is a former Brooklyn District Attorney and city comptroller who, in 1993, suffered a devastating downturn in her political career when she lost her race for re-election to Alan Hevesi amid charges she had accepted a campaign loan from a bank seeking business with the city.

Reading newspaper headlines from 2005 on Bush’s secret order for the National Security Agency to begin domestic spying on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in 2002 made her heart “sink,” she said, and also prompted her to write the book, “The Impeachment of George W. Bush, A practical guide for Concerned Citizens.” (Copies of the paperback edition, co-authored with Cynthia L. Cook, were available in the back of the auditorium.)

“Why did my heart sink?” she inquired rhetorically. “This was what happened with Richard Nixon: illegal wiretapping. He wiretapped journalists. He wiretapped staffers. It didn’t matter what the law said. When the president puts himself above the law, we are on our way to tyranny.”

She concluded her formal remarks with a challenge to the audience: “What are you going to do about it? Are we going to ignore this because it’s too much trouble and there are only 18 months left”? she said of Bush’s second term. “What kind of constitution are we turning over to the next generation? What will the next president do in the next 18 months? Will he take us to war in Iran?”

Holtzman claimed it was up to the Democratic Party to be the leaders in protecting “the rule of law and making sure the president of the United States preserves our constitutional democracy. That’s what’s at stake here. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Holtzman, of course, is hardly the only Democrat to call for Bush’s impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hinted that proceedings against him would begin before the Democrats won a narrow margin in congress after the mid-term elections last November. But after the election, Pelosi said impeachment was “off the table.” On June 16, 2005, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and 12 other members of Congress hand-delivered to the White House a petition signed by 560,000 Americans demanding that Bush address evidence from the Downing Street Memo published that year in the United Kingdom contending that the Administration had lied to the Congress and the American people in order to start the war.

On December 20, 2005, the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff filed a 273-page report on Conyers’ request called, “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution and Cover-ups in the Iraq War.” The report included copies of House resolutions to establish a bi-partisan Select Committee in the House to censure both the President and Vice President Dick Cheney. But as of May 18, 2006, Conyers appeared to have scrapped his push to boot Bush, noting in an interview that “rather than seeking impeachment, I have chosen to propose comprehensive oversight of these alleged abuses.”

Earlier that year, at an unofficial hearing of Democrats on the House Judiciary, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called for the committee to explore whether Bush should face impeachment stemming from his decision to authorize domestic surveillance without court review. But the proceedings had no legal authority.

Moreover, as Holtzman observed, only two presidents have ever been impeached in the nation’s history: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. (The Senate vote against Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky scandal fell short of the Constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority to convict and remove him from office.)

Stephen Skyles-Mullligan, president of the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club, who fielded questions put to Holtzman, said later he didn’t think too many elected officials would be pushing impeachment these days, “but a lot of people are interested on the grassroots level, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see some motion in the City Council. But I think with the Congress, the Republicans discredited the process with what they attempted to do with (President) Clinton, and so it’s a real hot potato.”

Indeed, most Democratic senators (including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) backed away from a resolution introduced in 2006 by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), calling for the censure of President Bush because of his warrantless wiretapping program, apparently believing the issue would cost them votes in red states, according to the Washington Post.

Responding to questions, Holtzman commented on the political will and backbone necessary for impeaching a president and acknowledged that there was no “national movement.” But she noted that three dozen Vermont towns recently voted for resolutions calling on Congress to begin an impeachment probe of Bush and Vice President Cheney and suggested that the New York City Council and Senate could do something similar.

Asked about what can ordinary citizens do to oust the president, she replied, “This is not a banana republic. People can contract members of congress and do the normal kind of grass roots movement. You can write letters and call. I believe it’s worth it. I believe it’s critical that Bush can’t be allowed to get away this.”

But Holtzman added that there also needs to be a “serious investigation” of George W. Bush’s conduct by the Senate in which lawmakers would inquire, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” She added, “If we can show the American people that Bush lied to get us into the war. I believe the anger will be overwhelming” and lead to his removal.

Asked if it was possible to impeach Cheney as well, Holtzman said that she believed a “proper investigation would have the effect of getting rid of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and having the first woman president of the United States.”

Her audience laughed loudly and applauded her wish list.