Open letter to Nancy Pelosi

Dear Speaker Pelosi,

As you may be aware, several citizens attended your November '07 address at Meredith College in Raleigh prepared to challenge you on the theme of the lecture series “Ethical Leadership.” The program issued for the event advertised a rigorous discussion of the lecture theme.

Those of us who came to Meredith to challenge your leadership were threatened with arrest if we attempted to display signs, distribute literature, or strayed outside our designated “Free Speech” pen, defined by a circle of orange traffic cones set up out of view of the hall where you were speaking.

As a member of the Grass Roots Impeachment Movement, I came to Meredith to ask you these questions:

If you take impeachment off the table, are you not placing yourself in complicity with, and accessory to the impeachable crimes ascribed to George Bush and Dick Cheney?

And if, as speaker of the house, leader of the majority party who sets the agenda in the house of representatives, you have the power to take impeachment off the table, how can you argue that you lack the power to take war funding off the table?

Madame Speaker, you can’t have it both ways. If you prevent impeachment hearings, you may as well re-register yourself as a Republican, since you are essentially providing the Bush administration the same protection as the 109th Republican Congress.

If you claim to want to end the US occupation of Iraq, but refuse to stop occupation funding, then you are violating your trust as a servant to the people, and are as guilty as Bush and Cheney.

The Constitutional remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors committed by our chief executives is impeachment. If Bush and Cheney are protected by this Democratic Congress from hearings on impeachable crimes, we can never expect that any future administration will be held accountable for lawlessness.

Madame Speaker, you can show us the way and endear yourself to generations of Americans if you remove this veil from your eyes and the eyes of your fellow citizens. We need impeachment hearings NOW!