Ari's Planet

Members of Congress refuse to impeach President Bush or VP Cheney. Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich has been trying to move impeachment forward. Only a small number of representatives have shown support for impeachment. I find it intolerable that other members of Congress have refused to act on impeachment, including my current representative, Barney Frank, and my former representative David Price. I have written to both Frank and Price and told them I would oppose their reelection should they fail to act to impeach. They have both replied that they will not impeach. I propose to create a web site where people can indicate that they will not vote for a representative due to his or her failure to act on impeachment. The number of people indicating their position will be available to the public and, more importantly, to the representatives, so that they can directly see a lower-bound on how many people will no longer vote for them due to their failure to impeach.

I typically do not reduce complex national politics to a single yes/no vote for a representative, as national issues are complex. The actions of the current administration, however, are so egregious and numerous that I cannot continue to support members of Congress who do not take necessary action against the administration. There are many actions for which impeachment should be pursued, but let me give one example. The US government has been promoting the idea that it is acceptable to torture people (though they tend to use other euphemisms). Worse, they have been torturing people. This is a morally untenable position. It is also an illegal activity. I recently visited the infamous Tuol Sleng museum in Cambodia. Here, there are objects used in torture, including a table and bucket used for waterboarding. A painting by survivor Vann Nath depicts the waterboarding of a prisoner. Waterboarding is one of the methods of torture that the US government has been using. It was a sickening feeling, to stand among the relics of a genocidal regime and to contemplate that my own government is using some of the same illegal and immoral methods on its prisoners.

All that is needed for the proposed website is a simple record of people, consisting of name, address, and 9-digit zip code. This information would be stored in a database table. A second display page would list all current representatives along with the number of people in that representatives' district who have registered. That's it, pretty simple. There needs to be a public database that links zip-codes to representatives that can be queried when a voter registers; if this is not available, then the submitter could select a representative manually, though use of zip code for automatic look-up (or cross-verification) would be preferred.

Members of Congress

Ideas for individual action to support impeachment

Wikipedia article on Impeachment of Dick Cheney lists 26 cosponsors of H. Res 333, a resolution introduced by Dennis Kucinich to impeach Dick Cheney.

Is there a list of representatives who support impeachment? Google wasn't being much help.