No GOP Senator Will Vote To Impeach. Here's Why.

Phoenix Woman

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Thursday July 12, 2007 · 7:30 AM PDT

2007/07/12 · 07:30

There's been lots of talk about How We Must Impeach Bush. But all this talk ignores two central facts:

We need a bunch of GOP Senators to get the 67 votes need to convict Bush and remove him.

As John W. Dean points out, there aren't enough GOP Senators willing to vote to remove Bush, or even Cheney.

Why is this? Follow me past the jump and find out.

It's become increasingly clear that any GOP Senator that dared vote to impeach and remove George W. Bush or Richard B. Cheney, no matter why, would find him/herself a) cut off from future campaign funding, and b) facing serious primary challengers at the very least. Voting to impeach Bush, Cheney or even Gonzales would be like a lightweight rapper going up against KRS-One circa 1995: It would end their careers.

How do I know this? Because it's happened before -- to those Republican legislators that dared side with the Democrats on impeaching Richard M. Nixon, forcing him to resign rather than be removed. Chief among these: Lowell Weicker, who sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Weicker was a very popular Senator from Connecticut. He was a hard figure to take down. Yet Republicans, particularly the paleoconservative and neoconservative wings that elected Reagan and Bush, have long memories and carry grudges over decades. They methodically purged their party of the relatively-sane socially-moderate, and "Rockefeller Republicans" whereever possible, and Weicker was Target Number One.

In the end, they were so hot to take him out that they actually backed a malleable, outwardly pious, pro-business Democrat, Joe Lieberman, against him in the 1988 general election. That did the trick.

Can you make Congressional Republicans fear you more than they fear their human base and the insitutional angels like Scaife that form the GOP's financial base? If you can, then impeachment might succeed. If not, fuhgeddaboudit.

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