Cindy Sheehan:
"The Democrats will not hold this administration accountable, so we have to hold the Democrats accountable," Sheehan said outside Conyers' office after the meeting. "And I for one am going to step up to the plate and run against Nancy Pelosi."
Profoundly bad idea. Here's why.
Cindy Sheehan's decision to run against Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House, will not bring about impeachment. Not if she wins; certainly not when she loses, which is the far more likely outcome.
In fact, arguably, Sheehan is setting back the actual impeachment effort, by injecting a partisan race into it.
First, some history. Following the initial statement by the then-minority leader to the effect that impeachment was off the table, the reaction from advocates was swift.
David Swanson of the pro-impeachment group AfterDowningStreet.org hit her from the left.
"She's thinking in terms of the election. It's disgraceful to put electoral politics ahead of checks and balances and the Constitution,'' Swanson said Friday.
Swanson accused Pelosi of timidity that won't bring a victory in November. "We should learn for once in our lives to stand up and show that the Democratic Party is fundamentally opposed to the current administration's agenda,'' he said.
Obviously, Swanson was wrong, given the Democratic victory in November; that prediction should also be kept in mind when suggestions are made that a failure to impeach will generally have dire consequences in November 2008.
What the present effort by Sheehan is likely to do is simply this: to make impeachment a matter on which the Speaker is seen as being under electoral pressure. There is little in the evidentiary record to suggest that she likes to be seen as giving in to any kind of pressure, however. That's certainly one conclusion one can draw from the fight over the House Majority Leader position, in which Nancy Pelosi backed John Murtha over Steny Hoyer against considerable opposition; the fight over Jane Harman's elevation to head the intelligence committee; the successful raising of the minimum wage. Certainly, following Sheehan's announcement, any move by House Democrats to craft articles of impeachment will now be viewed as related to preserving the seat of the Speaker - for example, by the not entirely impartial rightwing kommentariat.
Nor is it helpful that Sheehan has injected partisanship into a question that requires a bi-partisan, even non-partisan or a-partisan solution. It is a generally accepted trope of the literature on impeachment that the process needs, to have legitimacy, to be divorced from considerations of electoral politics. Sheehan's candidacy, by injecting electoral considerations into the ongoing debate, achieves the opposite.
In addition, as is usual for Cindy Sheehan, she has clouded the waters somewhat with contradictory statements about her ultimate goals.
It is also with a heavy heart that I announce my candidacy against Nancy Pelosi in California's 8th. If anybody would dare think I am not serious, I would hope they would look back at the last 3 years of my life and everything I have sacrificed to restore our nation to one that obeys the rule of law and can be looked up to with respect once again in the international community and not as the hated laughingstock on the block.
I am committed to challenging a two-party system that has kept us in a state of constant warfare for the last 60 years and has become more and more beholden to special interests and has forgotten the faces of the people whom it represents.
Impeachment is not going to come about, in a Congress composed of members of two parties, save the occasional odd independent, by running against the two-party system itself. What this statement does is make Sheehan's candidacy an express Naderite assault on the two-party system and more specifically, the Democratic component thereof. It's very difficult to see how House Democrats, especially if Sheehan's candidacy gains even slight traction, can support impeachment efforts without at least potentially empowering broadly Naderite, rejectionist forces, certainly in safe Democratic districts comparable to Pelosi's Eighth District.
Conversely, bad polling numbers for Sheehan, which are to be expected, will serve as mediatic evidence that impeachment is not popular. Similarly, an anti-war candidate ran against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary in New York in 2006; his defeat was interpreted as a sign that the anti-war movement wasn't yet electorally potent, a conclusion decisively repudiated in the general election. However, it is to be expected even in a district centered in San Francisco that an experienced incumbent legislator backed by the local party infrastructure will always out-perform a rival with no natural, organically grown base of support in the district. In short, what will be a contest over many issues, local and Federal, between an experienced, solidly backed incumbent and an inexperienced challenger with a demonstrated propensity for verbal gaffes will be portrayed as a referendum on a much narrower subject, namely impeachment.
Numerous diarists and commenters have already pointed out that even a successful Sheehan run would not result in impeachment and removal. Wmtriallawyer lays out, here, that impeachment isn't actually the duty or right of the Speaker, but of the House at large, which adds to the weight of evidence that this candidacy is, ultimately, a futile effort. I would go further and state that it is actually counter-productive. Impeachment will not succeed unless Democrats and republicans can put aside electoral considerations; Cindy Sheehan's quixotic run that makes that already slim eventuality even more remote.
Somebody should tell Cindy.