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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (280413)	3/16/2006 5:56:07 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576380

Call for Censure Is Rallying Cry to Bush's Base By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: March 16, 2006 WASHINGTON, March 15 — Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush. The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives' plans to harness such attacks to their own ends. With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal. "Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now," Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter. The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party's demoralized base to go to the polls. With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all." For weeks, Republicans have taken to conservative Web sites and talk radio shows to inveigh against the possibility, however remote, that Democrats could impeach Mr. Bush if they gained control of Congress. Mr. Feingold's censure proposal fell far short of a demand for impeachment. Most Democrats in the Senate distanced themselves from it, concerned that they would be tagged by Republicans as soft on terrorism. But the censure proposal provided Republicans an opening. "This is such a gift," the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh told listeners on his syndicated radio program on Monday, saying the Democrats were fulfilling his predictions. "They have to go back to this impeachment thing," he said. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, a conservative standard-bearer, echoed the thought. "We'd like to congratulate the Wisconsin Democrat on his candor," its editors wrote Wednesday in a column headlined "The Impeachment Agenda." The Republican National Committee sent the editorial out to its e-mail list of 15 million supporters. Brian Jones, a Republican spokesman, said the e-mail messages generated a higher response than anything the party had sent in several months, including bulletins about the Supreme Court confirmations. "Clearly on our side it is something that is energizing our base a little bit," Mr. Jones said. "This is not about getting things done," he added. "This is raw partisan politics."In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Feingold declined to rule out supporting impeachment in the future, saying that the wiretapping "probably is the kind of thing the founding fathers thought of as high crimes and misdemeanors." But Mr. Feingold also said he proposed the milder rebuke of censure instead of impeachment in part because of the context of the war and in part to avoid a political backlash from Mr. Bush's supporters. "They can try to turn this into their fantasy, but that is not how this comes off," Mr. Feingold said, noting that his proposal addressed only the narrow subject of the wiretapping program. "I didn't throw in Iraq or a lot of other things that frankly are pretty bad." Still, conservatives said they welcomed the debate over censure or impeachment. Some said they were especially pleased with the timing of Mr. Feingold's proposal because it came just after the Democrats had upstaged the Republicans on national security during the outcry over an Arab company's takeover of several port terminals in the United States. "They finally found the issue where they could convince the American people that they, too, see an enemy," Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio program. "In less than two days they are back to the N.S.A. scandal as though we don't have a national security problem," he said, referring to the domestic eavesdropping program run by the National Security Agency. 12 Next Page > nytimes.com