On Thursday, Congressman Anthony Weiner told Bob Fertik of Democrats.com that he would sign onto Congressman Robert Wexler's letter to Chairman John Conyers urging the commencement of impeachment hearings for Dick Cheney. Wexler, together with Congress Members Luis Gutierrez and Tammy Baldwin, hopes to have a majority of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sign the letter.
Of the four committee members named above, only Baldwin is among the six committee members and 25 total congress members backing Congressman Dennis Kucinich's resolution for the impeachment of Cheney. The other five Judiciary Committee members are Hank Johnson, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison, Steve Cohen, and Sheila Jackson Lee. If these nine committee members sign the letter to Conyers that Wexler hopes to deliver early in January, another 12 Democrats, not counting Conyers, will still not have joined the position of 80 to 90 percent of Democratic voters.
On November 6th, Conyers himself voted against tabling impeachment. So did Congress Members Brad Sherman, Mel Watt, Bobby Scott, and Artur Davis. If those members heed the call of their constituents, Wexler will have a clear majority of 13-8. The other 8 include the relevant subcommittee chair Jerrold Nadler, plus Congress Members Delahunt, Berman, Boucher, Lofgren, Sanchez, Schiff, and Wasserman-Schultz. Of these, only Nadler signed on, during the previous Congress, to then ranking member John Conyers' resolution calling for a preliminary impeachment investigation.
