Sam Husseini argues: "Partisan Impeachment Helped Get Us into this Mess. Transpartisan Impeachment Can Help Get Us Out." I encourage anyone looking for a collective way out of the lesser-evillist trap to check out his Vote Pact concept, which allows people across the political spectrum to break from the Duopoly parties without having to worry about so-called paradoxical results. You can also check out Break the Duopoly if you want help finding someone to make a Vote Pact with. Following is his proposal for transpartisan impeachment, written in the same spirit.
While Republicans voted to impeach Nixon, illegal war was explicitly excluded from the Articles of Impeachment to the dismay of Rep. John Conyers who was a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the 1974 impeachment inquiry. He would write the piece “Why Nixon Should Have Been Impeached” for The Black Scholar. The failure to include illegal wars in the Nixon impeachment helped ensure future wars and hindered future principled impeachments.
A political realignment is long overdue in the US. It has stalled largely because of the power of the duopoly, which is designed to marginalize anti-establishment forces. There are occasional rhetorical flourishes about left-right alliance, and there has been limited cooperation on matters such as the Epstein scandals between Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna.
But left-right cooperation is massively under-utilized as I’ve highlighted with my VotePact.org project. And contrary to popular refrain, left-right agreement is not rare, it’s just repeatedly treated as an aberration even though it keeps happening.
Especially troublesome has been that impeachment has remained a partisan affair, with each impeachment calcifying partisan compulsions to the point of brain-deadness and effectively immunized presidents from principled impeachment over illegal wars and therefore strengthened the Empire. No transpartisan impeachment as I outline below has been attempted.1 Of course Massie could break new ground and do this now in his remaining time in Congress with any number of Democrats.
Current movement in Congress regarding the illegal attack on Iran has been limited to War Powers Resolutions, now in their eighth round. They don’t capture the public imagination and Trump can just veto them.
I sent the following letter to Ralph Nader on April 8 after attending an event on impeachment that he organized. Constitutional lawyer and scholar Bruce Fein was one of the speakers and is known to be close to Massie. Dennis Kucinich and Robert Weissman were among the other speakers; see clips of me asking questions here and here, which I honestly found less than satisfying but which helped compel me to write the letter below.
Dear Ralph,
Thank you for organizing the thought provoking event today on impeachment.
Coming out of it, I’d recommend the following strategy to overcome the serious hurdles.
Get a Democrat to make a commitment with Massie: We will together move to impeach any president who does illegal war. The Democrat can be Rashida Tlaib or John Larson or someone else. This would give Massie cover to now back impeaching Trump now.
Once you have a Dem and a Republican, this impeachment becomes transpartisan. You don’t want to be associated with past partisan impeachments.
This would be a major step in making real the left-right alliance to confront the establishment as outlined in your book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left–Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.
Making Raskin central to this [Nader spoke of him at the event] makes it a purely partisan affair. And he stated in June 2024: “I have not called for a cutoff of all military aid to Israel.” Does he have a meaningful commitment to stop genocide and US government war crimes, or will he jerk this process around and effectively facilitate the continuation of war crimes?
Massie and the principled Democrat would be in a position to shame all other members of Congress for being warmongering partisan flacks. They could form the Stop War Crimes Caucus.
You could Godfather this process, bringing in others like Amash.
This would help galvanize the Arab American community to help lead the way in breaking out of the corrupt duopoly.
Constituencies could push Representatives to join the Stop War Crimes Caucus whose members would pledge to impeach any president who commits war crimes. Members could join in pairs, one Dem and one Rep.
A major argument against impeachment and removal of Trump is that we’d get Vance. But the Constitution specifically states: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Much of the country believes that Trump, Vance and much of the establishment are putting Israel first — i.e., treason.
If a transpartisan movement builds it can not only move to impeach and remove those guilty of said crimes. It can elect a new Speaker who has not been guilty or complicit in the war crimes committed by the current establishment. That could be Massie or someone else. Following impeachment and removal of the criminal president and VP, they then would become president.
This may seem far-fetched, but a profound reckoning for all the illegal wars, violations of domestic and international law, unending corruption and threat to the very existence of civilization and humanity is long overdue. If the US public is shown a path that people can get behind to use constitutional processes to give a rebirth to the rule of law, defeatism will turn to hunger and the promise of the USA can be fulfilled.
Please let me know if you have any questions or how I can help.
regards,
Usamah “Sam” Husseini
PS: Here’s a write-up of Amash proposing himself as Speaker [in 2022, after he left Congress] … making my proposal seem relatively modest.
On April 17, Nader published the piece “Demands for Firing or Impeachment of Trump Breaking Out Everywhere” which quoted Raskin at length and made no mention of Massie.
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