Impeach Bush? Not from Olympia

Of all the off-base ideas floating around Olympia these days, a pair of resolutions favoring impeachment of President Bush and urging the U.S. to get out of Iraq stand out for special mention.

One can be resoundingly opposed to many Bush policies and very eager for the U.S. to begin getting out of Iraq — as this editorial page is — and still realize that the Legislature is the wrong forum for expressing these sentiments. The state Senate held a hearing last week on two proposals: one by state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, to block troop increases in Iraq; the other by state Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, to call on Congress to investigate and consider impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Surely, state lawmakers have better things to do than make headline-grabbing statements about national and international policy. Impeachment has an important purpose in our government and a proper threshold for punishing presidents.

State lawmakers act as if their grandstanding — er, voting — makes a difference. It doesn't. The proper forum for challenging the president on his Iraq policy is in the other Washington, in the U.S. Senate and House.

Pointedly, as our lawmakers held their one-sided public hearing last week, some in the state's congressional delegation, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, to name two, urged state Senate leaders to drop the impeachment proposal.

Calls for impeachment at the state level are a distraction that only cause further political strife in the nation's capital. State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown and Gov. Christine Gregoire, appropriately, said the Legislature has more important things to work on, such as education and health care.

The memorial resolutions are needlessly divisive and reveal a state Senate too willing to fritter away public time and money.