To: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Madam Speaker,
The continual and systematic violation of our Constitution, knowingly and willingly engaged in by the President and Vice-President, under the guise of executive privilege and national security and in open defiance of Congress, has been sufficiently documented and deemed well within the criteria of high crimes and misdemeanors and well outside any acceptable or consistent practice of a free and Democratic country. Legal experts and scholars from across the American political spectrum and the American citizenry have also reached this judgment.
Our Constitution expressly calls for the removal from office through impeachment of a President and Vice President who commit high crimes and misdemeanors. However, after the election and prior to taking office, you decided to take impeachment off the table. While a desire for reconciliation and legislative progress may have influenced your decision, we believe this was a grave misapplication of the responsibilities of your office. Moreover, we believe the decided intractability and reckless behavior of the Executive Branch, as well as the additional evidence of presidential lawlessness, made increasingly public in the past year, now make your continuing decision to impede the Judiciary Committee from beginning immediate impeachment hearings a dereliction of your duties as Speaker and a grave violation of your sworn oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Madam Speaker, without impeachment the gross abuse of power and subversion of our system of checks and balances by the President and Vice President will stand as precedent, conferring upon all future US Presidents the status and rights of a Monarch. How tragic, if in this event, what is remembered as the death knell of our great Democracy was Speaker Pelosi’s partisan misuse of the Speaker's Office in rendering a decision not to implement the Constitutional remedy of impeachment.
We the undersigned are petitioning you to put impeachment back on the table and as Speaker of the House instruct the Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings as soon as possible. We believe it would be unconscionable and dangerous, given the consequences, for you to do otherwise. When intelligent, educated and scholarly people begin to forecast the downfall of our Democracy, which for over 200 years has served as an inspiration and beacon for the world, it is incumbent upon our elected public servants to put partisanship away and act in the best interest of the country, which in this case is opening impeachment hearings as quickly as humanly possible.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
View Current Signatures
Click here to sign petition
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)