Pelosi says House Judiciary may hold hearings on Kucinich impeachment resolution

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this morning that the House Judiciary Committee may hold hearings on an impeachment resolution offered by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).

Kucinich is expected to offer a "privileged resolution" this afternoon calling on the House to look at whether President Bush should be removed from office for lying to Congress and the American public when he sought congressional approval back in 2002 for taking military action to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Pelosi has said previously that impeachment "was off the table," so her comments this morning were surprising, and clearly signaled a new willingness to entertain the idea of ousting Bush, although no one in the Democratic leadership believes that is likely since the president has only six months left in this term.

"This is a Judiciary Committee matter, and I believe we will see some attention being paid to it by the Judiciary Committee," Pelosi told reporters. "Not necessarily taking up the articles of impeachment because that would have to be approved on the floor, but to have some hearings on the subject."

Pelosi added: "My expectation is that there will be some review of that in the committee."

A spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee had no immediate comment when asked whether Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the panel's chairman, planned hearings on Kucinich's impeachment resolutions.

Update: Conyers said he had just gotten Kucinich's new impeachment resolution, and he was not sure of when hearings would occur, or what kind of hearings be held. Democratic aides said they would examine "abuses of power" by the Bush administration, although it is unclear why or how that is different from what has taken place already throughout the 110th Congress.

One thing is clear, however — there will be no move to remove Bush from office, despite Pelosi's comments this morning, or Kucinich's resolution. (see sig)

Thanks for the pictures of the "celebratory" signing Glenn. Cheney looks positively giddy while Bush is trying hard not to laugh in the face of the rube Rockefeller. An awfully chipper group, that GOP, considering the serious concessions they had to give up in order to seal this "compromise" [/snark]

He could use the help.

He doesn't need my help-- he told me that with his vote on FISA-- and so my donations will go to the ACLU, EFF, Strange Bedfellows and progressive Democrats. BTW, Obama is neither my "friend" nor my "enemy." He's just a guy running for office who made a big mistake yesterday on an issue important to me.

The former are useful. The latter, not so much. I wouldn't even put them in my compost. Poop (thanks GC!) may eventually turn to fertilizer, but these guys need to be buried, along with the other non-compostables. Nothing there of value to retrieve.

They've been trying to force-feed the nukyewlar waste to Yucca Mtn. Is there some equivalent place we could put the toxic human waste?

I'm sorry if you think being employed or providing for your child is a "material comfort" but I'm a father now. Things like the continuing existence of the environment and making sure my son can eat, sleep and go to college are VERY IMPORTANT to me. So sue me.

Of course economic security is important. I'm not remotely suggesting otherwise. But it isn't the only important thing in life. If it were, there wouldn't be a U.S., as those who waged war against the British crown were perfectly secure financially, but risked that for basic freedoms.

Tyrannical governments frequently try to buy off their citizens by getting them to believe that the only thing that matters is economic security and as long as they have that, then they won't care about tyranny and corruption (hence, the gratitude towards Mussolini for getting trains to run on time). That's a dangerous attitude.

Even if you focus most on economic issues, you ought to be glad that others are focused on issues of core liberty. A corrupt, tyrannical, lawless government rarely does much for its people in any area. There are issues I don't focus on much, but I'm glad others do focus on those issues, and I don't run around trying to denigrate the importance of those issues just because I have a different set of priorities to which I devote my attention.

The transcript from Countdown indicates that Ms Maddow said "purely overseas calls".

This is specifically what I am trying to address. From reading Title 50 Chapter 36, it is readily apparent that the AG has always had the authority to tap purely overseas calls without warrants.

I would much prefer people talk about this more accurately (i.e. "the problem is email not phone calls") which is why I try to bring this up. I've even heard advanced versions of this where terrorist A signs into gmail, writes a draft, and doesn't send it, and then terrorist B signs into gmail and reads the draft, writes a new response without sending, etc. In this way, the email technically never leaves Google's US servers, creating the geographic issues with determining where the sender/recipient are.

Further, I think the reason FISC smacked it down is because they sucked in all emails without making sure they're foreign-foreign (in order to handle the scenario above involving drafts), which would indeed violate 50 USC 1802(a)(1).

Last night I was writing a blog entry (click my name) on this and something very funny happened that I'll relate here. I was looking for a clip of "Kneel before Zod" from Superman 2, to make the point that unlike Superman Congress would do as commanded and kneel.

I googled for a clip and the second link was to RedState, to a post titled "Kneel Before Zod", gloating about the Democratic FISA capitulation.

I'd also like to add, Jonathan, that much of people's outrage on this issue stems from how politically needless it was to support telecom immunity and expansion of surveillance power.

That is, even from a purely political perspective, leaving aside the mountain of substantive arguments against immunity and removing more checks from surveillance, voting for these FISA amendments has brought and will bring few (if any) political benefits to those supporting them.

So, this isn't an issue of economic security vs. civil liberties. There's absolutely no reason those two concepts have to be mutually exclusive. That's what has been so frustrating about this issue. The Republicans just walk up and say "boo!" and Democrats instantly think that means a monster is about to eat them.