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Impeach! The Shot Heard ‘Round the World

NEWFANE — As patriots go, Dan DeWalt looks the part. With his ponytail and winter beard, a pair of breeches and a musket would put him right into character in 1775.
But it was no act earlier this month when DeWalt fired the opening salvo of his revolution. Only this time, the shot heard ’round the world came not from a rebel in Massachusetts but from a selectman in Vermont. And rather than start a shooting war, it was meant to put a stop to one.

DeWalt, 49, is as mystified as anybody at his international star status as the author of a town meeting resolution, which Newfane voters passed 121-29, calling for the impeachment of Pres. George Bush, in part because he “used falsehoods to lead our nation to war unsupported by international law.”
Other cities and towns have passed similar measures, including San Francisco. Newfane was the first of five Vermont towns to do so — Brattleboro was expected to take it up at representative town meeting on Saturday. At least six Vermont Democratic County Committees have also voted in favor of impeachment proceedings.

But it has been DeWalt — a carpenter and musician with no television, who reads history books, trolls international shortwave radio broadcasts for news, and until this month had never seen film footage from 9/11 — who has captured international attention from of the likes of The Economist, the U.K. Guardian and The Toronto Star.

The story of his challenge to Bush has been posted on websites in Australia, South Africa, the Basque region of Spain, and covered throughout the United States, from The Dallas Morning News to CNN and USA Today. By the time the Vermont Guardian caught up with him, he been interviewed 25 times. Reuters had just left and The Boston Globe’s photographer was on the way up.

He has also been lambasted and lampooned. The conservative Washington Times saw fit to report his annual income, his marital status, and even his choice of footwear (Birkenstocks). The Associated Press story was posted on “The Terrorism Knowledge Base,” a self-proclaimed “comprehensive databank of global terrorist incidents and organizations.”

No sooner did the Newfane news hit the wire than reactions started pouring in. Accustomed to companionable leaf-peepers and endorphin-jazzed skiers, postcard-perfect Newfane was suddenly in the midst of political controversy.

Lenore Salzbrunn, the president of the Newfane Business Association who at town meeting had tearfully defended the president, later fretted about tourism cancellations and told a reporter: “We need to stop adding to the negative news about Vermont.”

Lisa Thomas, assistant innkeeper at Four Columns Inn, said the colonial bed and breakfast had gotten calls from some regular guests who said they wouldn’t be back. “But we also got a lot of new guests who said they would come and stay.”

Among the e-mails that arrived at Newfane town hall was one last week from a pair of U.S. missionaries in Tanzania, who sent their congratulations for a vote “in the great American tradition.”

“You have set an example for the entire country,” wrote Graham and Dory Hutchins. “It is unfortunate that so many find your actions reprehensible and do not understand the value in the process in which you all engaged. It demonstrates that far too many people have forgotten, or were never taught, the basics of the republic in which they live. Those traditions that you abide by are in grave danger from an imperial orientation that values power over liberty, deception over truth.”

DeWalt is the darling of the liberal blogsphere as well. “Norman Rockwell would be proud of you, Dan DeWalt!” enthused one blogger on a Portland indy media site. “Let’s all send a dollar so that Newfane Selectboard member Dan DeWalt can stay elected a good long term,” urged another on Daily Kos, one of the most widely read blogs in the country.

DeWalt would likely be ambivalent about that. When he’s not building furniture or helping to start a new nonprofit newspaper, he’s busy teaching music and playing in several bands. He was recruited into local politics only last year, while collecting signatures for a town meeting resolution on the Iraq War. But in fact, road graders and town budgets are not really his thing.

Instead, he loses sleep over issues like warrantless wiretaps and the war. A large plywood sign on the dirt road at the end of his driveway in Williamsville keeps a running tally of the death toll in Iraq.

Every day since town meeting, when he checks his e-mail the in-basket is virtually overflowing. Some are predictable, like the thank you message signed “Osama bin Laden.” But the vast majority have offered congratulations and support, or sought information about how to get a resolution passed in their towns. So many that DeWalt has crafted a form “how-to” response offering them sample petitions and resources, and urging support for Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold’s motion for censure, and Michigan Democratic congressman John Conyers’ bill, which would require a congressional investigation into whether Bush committed impeachable offenses.

Despite those measures in Congress, impeachment remains a decidedly grassroots movement. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted: “It’s all over the blogosphere. It’s the cover story in the current Harper’s. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has passed an impeachment resolution. Antiwar activists, civil libertarians, all the usual-suspect constituencies have growing impeachment tendencies. But it’s reaching beyond the usual suspects.”

Several polls have shown that a majority of Democrats, most independents, and a majority of citizens overall support impeachment, according to columnist David Swanson. “And people don’t just support impeachment,” he wrote last week in a column entitled “Republicans for impeachment,” “they’re passionate about it. Bush is the least liked president on record, excepting only Nixon, and Bush is on track to break Nixon’s record this spring. Nothing will energize people to vote against Republicans like talk of impeaching Bush and Cheney. Few other issues can provide the dramatic motivation to turn out voters in an off-year election.”

But inside the Washington Beltway, there is little taste for it. Even Vermont’s rogue congressman, independent Bernie Sanders, resisted the town meeting directives calling on him to begin impeachment proceedings. Acknowledging that Bush may have acted illegally, Sanders said in a March 7 statement that Republican control of Congress makes it “impractical” to talk about impeachment.

The next week, however, Sanders changed his mind and signed onto the House bill. “We felt it appropriate, based on what Vermonters were telling us,” Sanders’ spokesman, Jeff Weaver, told a reporter. “This is really an example of grassroots democracy in action.”

DeWalt was unforgiving, accusing Sanders of making “a beeline for the middle of the road” in his bid for a Senate seat. “We would have expected that Rep. Sanders might not have waited until two days after the town meeting vote to join Democrats who in December sponsored legislation … to initiate such action,” he wrote to local papers.

“It remains to be seen if other U.S. citizens will join us in our quest to put the brakes on this renegade administration,” he continued. “If they do, let us hope that their representatives choose to follow, rather than throw cold water on their efforts.”

Democratic strategists agree with Sanders that given the GOP lock on Congress, impeachment proceedings would be an exercise in futility. Some even speculate it could backfire, giving Bush a lift in his flagging popularity ratings as the public rallied behind him. But that doesn’t dissuade DeWalt.

“People seem to think the notion of impeachment was somehow cheapened with Bill Clinton. But what can be more real than abrogation of the Constitution, breaking U.S. law, international law, breaking moral law with torture, lying — and the consequences of all these actions being the deaths of tens of thousands of people?” he asks.

So what does he hope to achieve by advocating for impeachment? A new president? A Democrat in 2008? DeWalt laughs long and low.

“If we get a Democrat, so what? If we get Hillary Clinton she’ll increase troop strength. We have been somnambulant as a people probably since the 50s. War World II is over, everyone breathes a great sigh of relief and goes shopping; 9/11 comes and Bush says go shopping. … My hope is not electing some Democrats, my hope is in the people finally going, ‘Oh my god, while I’ve been shopping everything has been falling apart around me. I need to do something.’

“Luckily, our politicians are spineless enough that if the people really spoke with one voice, they’d listen. So I really have my hope in the population of the United States taking a moral stand on what’s right and what’s wrong.”

DeWalt predicts that just hearing the word impeachment will be a wakeup call. “People are going to hear the word, and for the first 20 or 30 times they will think that’s drastic, but after while they’ll say let’s impeach this bastard.”

In this, Democrats smell blood. At least six of Vermont’s 13 Democratic county committees have passed the so-called Rutland resolution, named after the first county committee that passed it, said Rutland County Committee member Jeffrey Taylor, a Clarendon attorney.

In Bennington, the measure passed 71-0. Chittenden was expected to take it up on March 23.

Vermont Democrats hope that grassroots support will propel at least one member in both chambers of the state Legislature to introduce a resolution of charges against Bush. Taylor said Section 603 of the Manual for House Rules provides that state legislatures can file charges with the U.S. House. If just one congressman or woman agrees to use that as a basis for a privileged motion for impeachment, it would go to directly the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, where impeachment proceedings are initiated.

“I’m not self-delusional, thinking that this would be a success with the current Congress,” Taylor notes. “If it were to be launched with the 109th Congress it would be dead on arrival, tabled by the Republican majority. That does not, however, prevent individual citizens from making clear their displeasure at the current course of this government and an interest in having Bush essentially stand trial for his crimes and misdemeanors against the American people, against the Constitution.”

What’s more, Taylor said, such a measure would be a threshold for the 110th Congress. “If power changes, then the chances for some action to correct the constant, continuing problems that we have become much higher.”

In the meantime, DeWalt is hoping that a crescendo of popular support for impeachment will help stall the numbers on his war-dead tally board.
“If we mount pressure between now and November, and [Bush] wants to do some ridiculous new adventure — if the American people are crying for some kind of justice, or a move for impeachment — [Congress] is not going to be willing to jump on his next adventure wagon. If the lawmakers calculate a political liability in supporting his next bone-headed move, they’re not going to do it.”

Ever the populist, DeWalt adds: “Anything we as citizens can do is important because it makes those courageous congressmen take pause even that much longer before they are willing to go along with him. We’re at a tipping point.”

If that’s the case, historians might one day trace it to a subtle shift at an amicable town meeting in Newfane.

The resolution that roared

Whereas George W. Bush has:

1. Misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction;
2. Misled the nation about ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda;
3. Used these falsehoods to lead our nation into war unsupported by international law;
4. Not told the truth about American policy with respect to the use of torture; and
5. Has directed the government to engage in domestic spying, in direct contravention of U.S. law.

Therefore, the voters of the town of Newfane ask that our representative to the U.S. House of Representatives file articles of impeachment to remove him from office.
 
 

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