“We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush.”
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, during a House floor speech Wednesday
As Congress’ August recess loomed, partisan skirmishing reached a crescendo, with the U.S. House approving, on a near-party-line vote, a lawsuit against President Barack Obama on the grounds that he had overstepped his constitutional authority.
Democrats raised the specter of the president being impeached, though Republican House leaders insisted that impeachment wasn’t an option.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, suggested that Democrats had the moral high ground.
Even though some Democrats had thought that President George W. Bush had abused his authority when he initiated the Iraq war, the House, while under Democratic control in 2007 and 2008, did not impeach him.
The current resolution to authorize a lawsuit, Jackson Lee said in a floor speech Wednesday, “smacks against the Constitution, which says there are three equal branches of government. Therefore, the executive has the right to perform his duties. … It is a historical fact that President Bush pushed this nation into a war that had little to do with apprehending terrorists. We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush because as an executive, he had his authority. President Obama has the authority.”
A reader asked us to check whether it’s accurate for Jackson Lee to say, “We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush.” So we took a closer look.
Jackson Lee, it turns out, is an imperfect vehicle for making this charge. Here’s the problem: A dozen House Democrats in 2008 did introduce a resolution seeking the impeachment of Bush. Jackson Lee was one of the measure’s 11 co-sponsors.
The measure in question was House Resolution 1258, introduced by then-Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, on June 10, 2008. The resolution accused Bush of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
If Jackson Lee means to define “we” as the Democratic caucus as a whole, she has a point. The resolution never gained wide support among the Democrats, even though they controlled Congress at the time. The bill died quietly in committee.
Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, explained her thinking about the impeachment resolution in a July 2008 interview on ABC’s “The View.” “I thought that impeachment would be divisive for the country,” she said.
It seems odd to hear Jackson Lee saying “we did not seek” impeachment when she, in fact, was a co-sponsor of a measure that sought precisely that.
When we reached out to Jackson Lee’s office, communications director Michael J. McQuerry said, “the congresswoman was stating that the Democrats did not try to impeach President Bush over executive orders.”
We looked through Jackson Lee’s floor speech, however, and saw no references to executive orders.
Further undercutting Jackson Lee’s explanation, the 2008 impeachment resolution she co-sponsored did address executive orders twice.
Our ruling
Jackson Lee said, “We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush.” She has a point that neither the House nor a majority of the Democratic caucus sought Bush’s impeachment.
But a dozen Democratic lawmakers did — including Jackson Lee herself. It seems hypocritical of the congresswoman to seize the moral high ground — essentially saying that her party gallantly went against self-interest by declining to seek Bush’s impeachment — when in fact she personally had sought precisely that outcome.
We rate the congresswoman’s claim Mostly False.
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