Okay, I exaggered a little to get your attention. You can’t march up to Capitol Hill all by your lonesome, walk into James Sensenbrenner’s office, and tell him to start the process.
You don’t have to march anywhere but to the printer and the mailbox.
And to be fair, you will need some help from your friends. But it looks like it’s something you can do, right here, right now, to get the ball rolling.
Follow me over the flip to see how.
As many of you know, I am a faithful reader of the wonderblog Boingboing. The cover all sorts of oddball stuff, from anime and general weirdness to technology and politics. It’s no secret that the Boingboing staff is disenchanted with the current American misadministration, and today they posted a way that they — and you and I — can maybe, just maybe, do something about removing the rottenest of the apples.
A fellow named Jodin Morey from Impeach for Peace has already done the heavy lifting on this. Reading through Jefferson’s Manual, which as close as we get to a Congressional rulebook, he found a provision for a little-known and seldom-used process called a “memorial” to initiate an imeachment. In fact, the process appears to have only been used once, in a case from 1832 involving a judge in Missouri. The judge sentenced an attorney to jail and had him suspended from pleading before the federal court for 18 months, and in retaliation the attorney filed a memorial calling for the judge’s impeachment. (He was acquited by a single vote.)
Using the Peck/Lawless case as precedent and a template, Morey has created a memorial for citizens to use to impeach George Bush. Fair warning: This document is a PDF file and requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to open. I mailed Morey about a typo I found; if he responds, I will ask about having the document posted in a more accessible format.
The PDF file contains four relevant pages. There are two copies of the memorial, a cover letter for House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner, and a cover letter for ranking House Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers. The idea is to print out two copies of the document. Fill in the blanks in the first copy (your name, address, state, etc.). Mail one copy of the memorial together with the cover letter for Rep. Sensenbrenner to Sensenbrenner’s office. Mail the other copy of the memorial with the cover letter for Rep. Conyers to Conyers’ office.
Fill in the blanks on the second copy of the document, but don’t mail it in until October 12th. There is a big protest of some kind (I haven’t seen what kind yet) planned for October 5th, and the idea is for all these documents to arrive en masse in Washington a week later with the protests fresh in everyone’s mind.
Let me quote a bit from ImpeachforPeach.org regarding the mechanism by which these memorials can start impeachment proceedings:
“In the House of Representatives there are various methods of setting an impeachment in motion: by charges made on the floor on the responsibility of a Member or Delegate (II, 1303; III, 2342, 2400, 2469; VI, 525, 526, 528, 535, 536); by charges preferred by a memorial, which is usually referred to a committee for examination (III, 2364, 2491, 2494, 249G, 2499, 2515; VI, 552); or by a resolution dropped in the hopper by a Member and referred to a committee (April 15, 1970, p. 11941-2); by a message from the President (III, 2294, 2319; VI, 498); by charges transmitted from the legislature of a State (III, 2469) or Territory (III, 2487) or from a grand jury (III, 2488); or from facts developed and reported by an investigating committee of the House (III, 2399, 2444).”
The committee in question would be the Judiciary Committee, Hon. James Sensenbrenner, chairman, Hon. John Conyers, ranking Democratic member.
It is entirely possible that Sensenbrenner won’t act on the memorials. In fact that’s the way I would bet. This is why copies need to be sent to Conyers; so that before the election he can use them as part of an object lesson about how out of touch the Republicans are with the will of the people; and while we can’t count our chickens before they hatch, after the election hopefully they will give Conyers the ammunition he needs to start impeachment hearings as Judiciary chairman.
No doubt there will be people who wonder about the feasibility of such an action, or whether it is an efficient use of time, or whether they should bother. I ask them: What will it hurt? It will take at most thirty minutes and a couple of dollars. ImpeachforPeace.org has a number of rebuttals to arguments against impeachment, for those who still think we should be keepin’ that ol’ powder dry. And if you are dead set against doing this, all I ask is that you not stand in the way of those who are determined to do what it takes to get their country back, and are willing to do it themselves if they have to.