Ground Control to Major Tom

Congress is in recess for Memorial Day, and our representative, Tammy Baldwin, used the week to hold a series of "listening sessions" in my area. I took the morning off of work and went to a small town city hall to be a part of democracy in action. First of all, I was pleased to see Tammy looking so, well, normal. No red power suit today. She gave brief opening remarks and then simply went down her list of people who had signed up to speak to her. The room was packed, and it was not the usual suspects. It was ordinary people, some representing different nonprofit agencies and some just representing themselves.

With a few notable exceptions (one who was anti-choice and one who was anti-immigration, everyone
eventually got around to the issue of impeachment. What was really cool is, I'd be sitting there thinking about the National Livestock Identification requirements ... and then a woman got up and spoke about it. And then I was thinking about the little provision that was slipped into some bill or other, giving Bush the power to declare martial law in the case of a national emergency, that was not mentioned in any mainstream media outlet ... and a woman stood up and asked about it. It was like a lively Quaker Meeting.

I was something like speaker number 20, and I began to fear that I'd have to leave before my turn came. But 25 minutes before I had to be back at school all the way across town, my name was called. I spoke out for impeachment. I used my husband's argument that, if you are a law enforcement official and know a crime has been committed, you cannot decide that prosecution is "off the table" and maybe you'll just use oversight to keep it from happening again. I pointed out that no part of the Democrats' agenda is going to move forward as long as this administration is in power. I reminded her that she took an oath (as did Nancy Pelosi and every other member of Congress) to uphold the laws of the land, that this administration has broken law after law after law, and if that doesn't constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors" I don't know what does. I implored her to sign on to the motion to impeach Cheney. I got kind of emotional; okay, I actually cried. And I got huge applause. And then I had to book it back to work.

But it felt good to be able to speak directly to my congresswoman. Far more empowering than the peace rally this week, which I have yet to write about. It felt like she was listening.

Update: So I got a phone call from a friend at 6 this morning, saying she had woken up to me on the radio! Unfortunately it was on a fairly right wing program -- they were there recording yesterday -- and another colleague told me that people were calling in as "incensed taxpayers" because a public school teacher had taken a day off to go talk to Tammy Baldwin. The radio host vowed to find out who the teacher was. Blah blah blah. It pisses me off that people feel as if they own teachers. Their tax dollars go to pay for a lot of things that are far worse (like illegal war) but they don't yammer about that. I'm half expecting repercussions ...