Monday, February 19, 2007

The Fierce Urgency of Impeachment

We have said it before and we will say it again; there must be accountability this time!

Congress needs to stop effing around and get at it!

The Fierce Urgency of Impeachment:

I got up at 2 a.m. this morning in Charlottesville, Va., my town and the town of Thomas Jefferson, the man whose greatest fear for our republic was of elected despotism. Jefferson and Madison and Mason and the others who drafted the most influential Constitution the world has seen, created a system of elections, but devoted much more attention and many more words to creating a system for maintaining our democracy in between elections. They gave this essential power to the House of Representatives, as the branch most subject to popular control, and they called this power impeachment.

The founders knew that democracy could only be maintained through eternal vigilance. But we – or perhaps more G.E. and Disney than we – have substituted for eternal vigilance an eternal election season. I don't know if the founders could have imagined the way in which elections are killing our democracy, but they certainly imagined that the loss of the power of impeachment would mean a return to tyranny.


No comments: