PDHblog
This is a place for members of Progressive Democrats of Hawai‘i to express their thoughts
and exasperations about political happenings. The opinions and views are not necessarily
those of PDH's steering committee or membership as a whole.

Dennis Kucinich today introduced a new resolution on the House Floor today, H.Res. 799, that was the same, in substance, as his previously submitted H.Res.333 to impeach VP Cheney, as previously planned (see previous posts on this thread.) Shortly afterwards, as anticipated, someone (in this case, Steny Hoyer) moved to table Kucinich’s resolution. Kucinich guessed that his resolution would be tabled, but thought it would be meaningful to see who voted which way.

At first, the voting rolled out as expected, with a majority in favor of tabling the motion. It seemed certain that the motion to table would succeed, as expected.
But then something odd started happening: a few Republicans started voting against tabling the resolution. Then the fog rolled in as Republicans who had voted for tabling started flipping their votes to against. A bunch of us were watching this happen, and couldn’t believe our eyes. You can see the play-by-play over at FireDogLake in the comments to Jane Hamsher’s blog, I’m With Donna Edwards, beginning at comment #24.

After five minutes or so, the Republican majority in favor of tabling dwindled down to 50/50, and then started to reverse! Then some Democratic votes started fllipping, too! Then, wonder of wonders, the “Nays” caught up to the “Ayes”, and the vote-flipping continued. Much to our surprise, the motion to Table, which would essentially have killed it, was defeated in a landslide! 78 Democrats voted against tabling the motion.
This unexpected victory for Kucinich was a mixed blessing, because it obscured his original objective of seeing who might vote against tabling as a clue to who might vote in favor of impeachment: With more than 90% of Republicans voting against tabling, there was obviously some other scheme afoot.

Hoyer then moved to refer Kucinich’s motion to the House Judiciary Committee, where Kucinich’s other bill, H. Res. 333, is currently languishing. Kucinich insisted on a recorded vote for that, too. Almost all Democrats voted in favor of referral, and almost all Republicans voted against referral. The Democrats won the vote to refer. This will probably kill it, as the Democrats don’t want impeachment proceedings to distract them from other Important Business. As for myself, I wonder what could be more important than impeaching a war-monger VEEP who wants to bomb the heck out of Iran because… well, the reasons change on a weekly basis, but the Bush-Cheney administration has portrayed Iran as a member of the “Axis of Evil”. There are also a bunch of other high crimes and misdemeanors to choose from.
Kucinich has also announced plans to introduce a resolution of impeachment of President Bush. Some of the charges to choose from can be found here, to which we can probably add his illegal orders authorizing water-boarding.

UPDATE: Kagro X has provided his summary of today’s Kucinich motion, OK, so did you get that?, at DailyKos.

UPDATE II: A live blog of the proceedings is posted at http://impeachcheney.org
Bob