More on Feingold's Censure Proposal

The polls around the country show that Americans are catching on to Bush and his Republican friends. If there are still elected Republicans in in Washington who care about the future of this nation, it's time to knock off the political games and think seriously about how to hold Bush accountable before he finds more holes to dig himself into along with the rest of the nation.

Congress has options and no one should pretend those options don't exist. Grounds for impeaching Cheney and Bush exist and Republicans know it. But if they are shy about taking the most serious of constitutional steps, there are others that can still with the incompetence and recklessness of the administration. Those steps include censure, budget cuts that hamper Bush where his recklessness is most obvious, legislation to tight what Bush can do and Congressional investigations that aren't merely whitewash jobs.

When Feingold first proposed his censure resolution, he was heaped with scorn, but as J. Kingston Pierce of Limbo points out in his long post, Feingold's proposal has legs:

By April Fool’s Day, Feingold’s proposal appeared to be going nowhere. The New York Times seemed sure to condemn it to unsanctified ground, when its editorialists proclaimed both censure and impeachment “the dream of liberals.”

But then the American Research Group conducted a nationwide survey that discovered a plurality--46 percent--of respondents saying that Bush should be censured “for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders.” Suddenly, the idea of censure didn’t seem like such a sop to the left wing, after all. Last Sunday, both Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and his former 2004 presidential running mate, John Edwards, endorsed the censure idea--Kerry on NBC’s Meet the Press, and Edwards during a campaign swing through Iowa.

And now, Craig Crawford, an MSNBC commentator and Congressional Quarterly columnist, is floating the notion that Democrats could employ a promise to censure Bush as one of the best reasons for voters to elect a Dem majority in the Senate come November.

For five years, Republicans in Congress have given Bush a blank check and a free ride. If nothing else, Democrats need to promise that there will be accountability for Bush's failed foreign policy and that there must be changes and we must get our nation back on track.