Kucinich effort to impeach Bush kicked into limbo:
An attempt by Rep. Dennis Kucinich to impeach President Bush was kicked into legislative no-man's land by members of his own party Wednesday.The House voted 251-166 to send the Ohio Democrat's impeachment resolution to committee, a maneuver that allows the Democratic leadership to freeze the measure indefinitely
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said she would not support a resolution calling for Bush's impeachment, saying such a move was unlikely to succeed and would be divisive.
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All 166 votes in favor of opening up a House impeachment debate came from Republicans, apparently eager to bring up the vote immediately and paint Democrats as political creatures in a time of serious issues.
To summarize: A vote against committing was in fact a vote to bring impeachment to the floor for a vote. The republicans who voted NO were voting for "impeachment", so they could have the debate and then vote it down.
The vote FOR commitment was to STOP the impeachment bill, to kill it, to make it go away. The Democratic leadership indicated that their caucus had to vote to commit, because they didn't want to lose the vote on the issue.
So, if you want to argue that Castle went against his party by not playing along with the game of endorsing an impeachment hearing on the floor of the house, you are absolutely correct.
But you are totally and completely WRONG if you believe that a vote to send the bill to committee was a vote FOR the bill, or a vote in SUPPORT of the bill. The Democrats didn't want an impeachment vote; they were opposed to an impeachment vote, and sent the bill to a committee in order to get rid of it without having to actually vote on it, inflaming their base.
BTW, the same thing happened the previous year, when Kucinich tried to impeach Cheney:
Last year, Kucinich introduced a resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. But the attempt failed in November, when Republicans tried to force a debate on it. Democrats voted to send the resolution to the House Judiciary Committee, where the committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, has taken no action on it.Now, why did some vote FOR killing the bill, when the supposed official position of republicans was to debate the bill? That is a question to ask the house minority leader. It could well be that they wanted to LOOK like they were up for a debate, but didn't actually want to vote FOR a debate that could be misconstrued as voting for impeachment.
If that was the case, they would have counted the progressive democrat votes that could have brought the bill to the floor, and had enough republicans vote Yea to ensure that a last-minute vote switch couldn't bring the bill to the floor.
Or, it could just be that 24 republicans decided that something as serious as impeachment wasn't to be played for political purposes. Or it could be that some didn't want to have the impeachment debate, because they thought it would hurt them in their election (but note that their votes didn't SEEM to be needed to kill the bill, as all democrats voted to kill it).
It seemed clear to me at the time that the democrats decided to vote unanimously to kill their own bill, and then spin that as a vote FOR impeachment. The left-wing talking points for the next day certainly claimed that.
But it is a shame to see rational conservative freepers fall for the left-wing spin of their own party leadership stabbing them in the back.
“So, if you want to argue that Castle went against his party by not playing along with the game of endorsing an impeachment hearing on the floor of the house, you are absolutely correct.”
But doesn’t that just end it right there? The whole pro-Castle argument is that we need to have his 51st vote because he’s play on our team.
The fact of the matter is he doesn’t. When the Republican leadership comes up with a strategy, for whatever reason. They can’t count on him to play along because he’s a “maverick” who is going to go his own way, which usually means going with what the Democrats want.