John Nichols for The Capital Times (Madison, WI.) reports:When my friend Salli Martyniak heard that Nancy Pelosi would be featured on the CBS news program "60 Minutes," she got excited. Like a lot of professional women who have been turned into political activists by six years of Bush-Cheney-ism, Martyniak busied herself during the recently completed election campaign doing everything she could to end Republican control of the House. She put the right campaign signs in her yard, she hosted fundraising events, and she knocked on doors and made calls on behalf of the campaign to change the Congress. And she lit up at the prospect of the first female speaker of the House.Read the entire article.
But when Pelosi's segment aired on "60 Minutes" three Sundays before the election, Martyniak said, "I was shouting at the television. How could she say that? How could she so miss the point of being an opposition leader?"
What was it that so infuriated my friend and millions of other Americans who want this election to be about holding an out-of-control presidency to account?
Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who surfed a wave of voter resentment against the Bush team into the speaker's office in Tuesday's voting, bluntly declared that it would not be the purpose of a Democratic House to restore the rule of law. She made her comment despite the fact that more than three dozen members of her own caucus - including U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison - have joined U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, who will chair the Judiciary Committee in the new Congress, in calling for an inquiry into possibly impeachable offenses by the administration.
"Impeachment is off the table," Pelosi declared, calling it "a waste of time."
A waste of time?
Not in the eyes of the American people. A majority of those surveyed last fall by Ipsos Public Affairs, the firm that measures public opinion on behalf of The Associated Press, agreed with the statement: "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."
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Photo credit: House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. (AP/Capital Times)
Technorati tags: John Nichols, Capital Times, Impeachment, Nancy Pelosi, Bush, Cheney, Congress, Election, news, commentary
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