Today is the thirty-third anniversary of Barbara Charline Jordan's (D-TX) stirring speech on the House floor demanding that her fellow Representatives get a spine and uphold their oath to the Constitution.
On July 25, 1974, this African American woman stood up to the naysayers and clearly laid out the grounds for impeachment of Richard M. Nixon.
This is a woman who understood the impact of the words of the early Constitution.
Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, "We, the people." It is a very eloquent beginning. But when the document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that "We, the people." I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in "We, the people."
As I read her words, I only wish that John Conyers could have made them a part of the record. Listening to Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee spew the same arguments as were made in 1974 made me embarassed for our nation.
Common sense would be revolted if we engaged upon this process for petty reasons. Congress has a lot to do: Appropriations, tax reform, health insurance, campaign finance reform, housing, environmental protection, energy sufficiency, mass transportation. Pettiness cannot be allowed to stand in the face of such overwhelming problems. So today we are not being petty. We are trying to be big, because the task we have before us is a big one.
Wouldn't this argument have been the perfect comeback to Cannon and Forbes?
Update:
And for those who are Senate vote counters, Representative Jordan has an answer for you:
It is wrong, I suggest, it is a misreading of the Constitution, for any member here to assert that for a member to vote for an article of impeachment means that that member must be convinced that the President should be removed from office.
The Constitution doesn't say that. The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of the body, the legislature, against and upon the encroachment of the Executive. The division between the two branches of the legislature, the House and the Senate, assigning to the one the right to accuse and to the other the right to judge, the framers of this Constitution were very astute. They did not make the accusers and the judges the same person.
Representative Jordan quotes James Madison regarding the primary criteria in considering impeachment.
James Madison, from the Virginia ratification convention. "If the President be connected in any suspicious manner with any person and there is grounds to believe that he will shelter him, he may be impeached."
James Madison, again at the constitutional convention: "A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."
There are too many suspicious characters to count with whom the President has aligned himself. His repeated subersion of the Constitution is well documented.
Would that we had someone with Barbara Jordan's courage today. Please take a few minutes to read her speach.
Mogolori notes one of the most crucial quotes from the speech which I stupidly left out.
Today, I am an inquisitor; an hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total; and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.