Vermont Town Backs Bush Impeachment

Tuesday, March 7, 2006 3:34 PM EST

By DAVID GRAM

NEWFANE, Vt. - In a white-clapboard town hall, circa 1832, voters
gathered Tuesday to conduct their community's business and to call for the
impeachment of President Bush.

"In the U.S. presently there are only a few places where citizens can act in
this fashion and have a say in our nation," said select board member Dan DeWalt,
who drafted the impeachment article that was placed on the warning — or
official agenda — for the annual town meeting, a proud Yankee tradition in New
England.

"It absolutely affects us locally," Dewalt said. "It's our sons and daughters,
our mothers and fathers, who are dying" in the war in Iraq.

The article, approved 121-29 in balloting by paper, calls on Vermont's lone
member of the House, independent Rep. Bernie Sanders, to file articles of
impeachment against the president, alleging that Bush misled the nation into the
Iraq war and engaged in illegal domestic spying.

The impeachment item came at the end of a roughly four-hour meeting that was
devoted mostly to the local affairs of the town of 1,600. Among the other items
discussed was whether the town should fix some of the 100-year-old sidewalks in
the village.

The impeachment discussion took up almost half an hour, reflecting the intense
interest in the topic and something of a division over whether the town meeting
was the appropriate place to debate it.

Ann Landenberger argued that it was appropriate. "As a teacher I can't say to my
kids that what happens on the national level doesn't affect us at the local
level," she said. "Would that we could all be in a cocoon, but that is not the
case."

Greg Record, a justice of the peace, said in an interview after the meeting that
the town is made up of people from the "far-left," and he criticized the amount
of time and attention such advisory votes get.

"We spend more time on these things than on a million-dollar budget item," he
complained.

The president did have his supporters during the debate.

Lenore Salzbrun defended Bush, saying she had close friends who died in the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "I am so grateful that our president didn't just put
his head in the sand ... and did go out and fight," she said.

Sanders issued a statement saying that although the Bush administration "has
been a disaster for our country, and a number of actions that he has taken may
very well not have been legal," given the reality that the Republicans control
the House and the Senate, "it would be impractical to talk about impeachment."