by Pat LaMarche

Nancy Pelosi called the president a failure Thursday. Well you know what they say: "Takes one to know one."

For an ordinary gal, I spend quite a bit of time in Washington, D.C. I spent the Fourth of July with one of my heroes, Sen. Mike Gravel. He and his delightful wife, Whitney, had a dinner party. We watched the fireworks from their balcony overlooking the Potomac River. The Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial framed the explosive spectacle across the way.

I must confess: I don't like fireworks. They put carbon into the atmosphere and remind me of bombs. I wonder what sort of fear I would feel if they were bombs instead of entertainment. Then again, bombs have become entertainment to us. Who didn't watch the bombing of Baghdad on TV during the big "shock and awe" season of 2003?

According to New York Times Art Critic Michiko Kakutani, 25 percent fewer folks went to the movies during the bombing because, "people stayed home to watch the war, and snack food sales and restaurant deliveries thrived."

How repulsive we are! Bombing a city of 4.5 million people didn't wreck our appetites.

I wonder where Nancy Pelosi was during the fireworks -- those in D.C. this month or those that killed people in Baghdad in 2003. I don't know if we'd have had as much fun if the speaker had been at Sen. Gravel's house on the Fourth, but she could have learned from the senator about the special kind of courage it takes to vote against funding illegal wars.

Ironically, Speaker Pelosi is the head of the opposition party. She's supposed to lead her party in opposition to the actions of the president who is in the "ruling party." The terminology's all confused because the speaker's party is actually in power in Congress, which should make them the ruling party, and the president isn't supposed to be a "ruler."

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the president is "the head of the executive branch of the federal government whose role is to enforce national law as given to him in the Constitution and written by Congress."

But, over the last eight years, those knuckleheads in Congress gave the president of the United States their power -- and pretty much all of ours, too -- and now they don't know how to take it back. But the answer to reclaiming power is just like the definition of the president.

Congressional power is defined by the Constitution!

The way they could wrestle back control, according to Article 2 Section 4, would be impeachment of the president, and the vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense and so forth. Any civil officer of the federal government can be brought before Congress and tried. Because the Constitution made Congress the ultimate boss!

Now remember, a trial doesn't mean a person's guilty, it means that a person looks guilty and society has a right to hear the evidence that could prove the point, one way or the other.

Our failure of a Congress can't say they don't know people want that trial, because wanting a trial is how they got elected.

The people of America wanted Congress to wrestle power back for the people; under the misguided notion that Congress represented them.

Want evidence? An October 2006 poll published in Newsweek magazine said that the majority of Americans wanted the president impeached. The next month the president's party lost control of Congress. When Speaker Pelosi took impeachment off the table it wasn't because Americans changed their minds -- a November 2007 poll by the American Research Group found that Americans still favored impeachment -- it was because she changed her mind.

We've got another election coming up. If you like what's happening in the country, vote for an incumbent.

Before Speaker Pelosi calls another person a failure, she should go visit Sen. Gravel and learn about courage. Or just stand aside. As a representative, she too is a failure.

Pat LaMarche of Yarmouth is the spokesperson for the Evergreen Mountain Resort & Casino referendum campaign. She's the author of "Left Out in America [1]" and can be reached at PatLaMarche@hotmail.com [2].
© 2008 The Bangor Daily News