The evidence accumulated against the Bush administration — that intelligence linking Saddam Hussein’s government with al-Qaeda, alleging that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” and warning that Iraq was well on its way to acquiring nukes, may have been cherry-picked or even fabricated — cried out for serious investigation, at very least. Yet once in office, Pelosi and her colleagues backed away from investigating the charges and soon announced that impeachment was “off the table.”
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In a recent article in Time magazine, “10 Questions for Nancy Pelosi,” in which the congresswoman answered readers’ queries, Nancy Shipes of Woodstown, New Jersey, asked Pelosi why she had ruled out impeachment proceedings against the president.
Her response? “I took it off the table a long time ago. You can’t talk about impeachment unless you have the facts, and you can’t have the facts unless you have cooperation from the Administration. I think the Republicans would like nothing better than for us to focus on impeachment and take our eye off the ball of a progressive economic agenda.”
In other words, impeachment requires the gathering of evidence from a cooperative executive branch, and since the Bush administration refuses to cooperate, there’s nothing further Congress can do about it. This stunning admission is tantamount to saying that Congress cannot impeach the president without his permission. From the standpoint of Congresswoman Pelosi, the president and his tight-lipped minions are superior in authority to the U.S. Congress, a notion that would have the Founders turning in their graves.
