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Four Vermont Towns Back Bush Impeachment
At Least Four Vermont Towns Approve Move to Impeach Bush During Annual Meetings
By DAVID GRAM
The Associated Press
NEWFANE, Vt. - In a white-clapboard town hall, built circa 1832, voters gathered Tuesday to conduct their community's business and to call for the impeachment of President Bush.
"In the U.S. presently there are only a few places where citizens can act in this fashion and have a say in our nation," said select board member Dan DeWalt, who drafted the impeachment article that was placed on the warning or official agenda for the annual town meeting, a proud Yankee tradition in New England.
"It absolutely affects us locally," Dewalt said. "It's our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, who are dying" in the war in Iraq.
The article, approved 121-29 in balloting by paper, calls on Vermont's lone member of the House, independent Rep. Bernie Sanders, to file articles of impeachment against the president, alleging that Bush misled the nation into the Iraq war and engaged in illegal domestic spying.
Other cities nationwide have taken up resolutions calling for Bush's impeachment, notably San Francisco. But the sentiment has rarely spread to rural America unless you're talking about Vermont, known for bucking politics as usual.
At least three other southern Vermont towns, spurred by publicity about Newfane's resolution, endorsed similar resolutions during Tuesday's meetings: Dummerston, Marlboro and Putney.
In Newfane, the impeachment item came at the end of a roughly four-hour meeting Tuesday morning that was devoted mostly to the local affairs of the town of 1,600.
Among the other items discussed was whether the town should fix some of the 100-year-old sidewalks in the village.
The impeachment discussion took up more than half an hour, reflecting the intense interest in the topic and something of a division over whether the town meeting was the appropriate place to debate it.
Ann Landenberger argued that it was appropriate. "As a teacher I can't say to my kids that what happens on the national level doesn't affect us at the local level," she said. "Would that we could all be in a cocoon, but that is not the case."
Greg Record, a justice of the peace, said in an interview after the meeting that the town is made up of people from the "far left," and he criticized the amount of time and attention such advisory votes get.
"We spend more time on these things than on a million-dollar budget item," he complained.
The president did have his supporters during the debate.
Lenore Salzbrun defended Bush, saying she had close friends who died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "I am so grateful that our president didn't just put his head in the sand ... and did go out and fight," she said.
Sanders issued a statement saying that although the Bush administration "has been a disaster for our country, and a number of actions that he has taken may very well not have been legal," given the reality that the Republicans control the House and the Senate, "it would be impractical to talk about impeachment."
Jim Barnett, chairman of the Vermont Republican Party, said Sanders should reject the resolution: "We should not be impeaching presidents just because we disagree with them."
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