An Impeachment-Fed Ham

Democratic leaders worried about the impeachment obsession of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ain't seen nothing yet.

Kucinich tells us he's giving the House Judiciary Committee 30 days to act on his resolution proposing 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush before he raises even more hell on the House floor. This time, he says, he'll go back with perhaps 60 articles of impeachment.

"The minute the leadership said, 'This is dead on arrival,' I said that I hope they believe in life after death, because I'm coming back with it," Kucinich vowed in an interview. "It's not going to die."

Kucinich used a parliamentary maneuver last week to introduce the articles of impeachment against Bush. He insisted on spending nearly five hours reading the resolution into the Congressional Record.

The former presidential candidate says he'll meet with House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) this week to try to persuade him to consider just one little article of impeachment against Bush for waging war in Iraq "based on lies." Pick one, any one, Chairman Conyers!

"It only takes one of the 35 articles to establish an impeachable offense," Kucinich said.

Democratic leaders view the notion of impeaching Bush as an act of political suicide for the party. Kucinich says that "there are some things that yield to reason, and there are other things that yield to politics." He added that "I cannot understand what the political reason would be to not" impeach Bush.

Kucinich is thinking even bigger. His ultimate impeachment fantasy: "What I would hope for is that if articles of impeachment are forwarded to the Senate against the president, that the vice president would understand that he will come under scrutiny, too, and that he would resign so that the president could appoint someone who could take his office if he were forced to leave."

Sure, as soon as the Nationals win the pennant.

A Partisan Sense of Place

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) has been stewing over a reception that the Interior Department threw two months ago to celebrate America's national parks. Rahall, a big proponent of the park system, wouldn't set foot in the door.

The chairman was irate -- and continues to be -- about the venue: the National Republican Club of Capitol Hill. Pure blasphemy, from his humble Democratic point of view.

"Hosting an event honoring our National Parks, which belong to all Americans, at 'the national social club for Republicans' as it is described on the Club website, infuses the proceedings with inappropriate and unfortunate political overtones," Rahall wrote in a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne. "The National Republican Club is not simply a nice room in which to hold this function; it is an arm of a partisan, political organization."