Dear Progressive Reader,
It is almost an understatement to say “there’s been a lot of breaking news this week.” With revelations about a whistleblower complaint regarding a call between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine finally stimulating the leadership in Congress to take up a formal inquiry on impeachment, we'll probably be seeing a lot more news in the coming weeks. As Jud Lounsbury writes, “For those Democrats who are still not woke to the necessity of impeachment, remember that you took an oath to ‘defend the Constitution.’ ” The phone call that launched the inquiry was, as the President himself called it, “perfect.” It certainly appears, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, to have been a perfect “smoking gun” to demonstrate the sort of activities this administration has been engaged in since very early on the 2016 campaign trail, even before Trump received the nomination.
What happens next will depend on many factors and a long timeline, but, as I wrote last summer, The Progressive historically has led in the call for Congress to fulfill its duties. Writing in a 1973 appeal to begin impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, the magazine “called on its readers to pressure their elected representatives to fulfill their oversight responsibility. ‘[O]nly by exerting immense and unremitting pressure can we convince the Congress that it must discharge its constitutional responsibility,’” the editors wrote. Six months later, a June 1974 editorial (just one month before articles of impeachment were voted by the House) would read: “The hour is late, the danger is clear and present, and the remedy is at hand. It is time to get on with it.”
Last week was also the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the “Chicago Seven” trial, which stemmed from protests at Chicago’s 1968 Democratic National Convention. Writing in The Progressive in May 1970, William Chapman, who covered the entire trial, noted that the “anti-riot” law that was used to prosecute the demonstrators “puts a new restriction on what is normally regarded as free speech.” He ominously concluded, “It is entirely possible that this nebulous, unnecessary, and repressive law, born in the riots of the 1960s, will be around to haunt us for all too many years of the 1970s.” Which, in fact, it was—even being threatened against protesters in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
Elsewhere in the world, and on our website, Kathy Kelly reminds us of the civilian victims in the nearly two-decades-long war in Afghanistan; Olivia Alperstein pens an op-ed on the “International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons” (September 26); and Joeff Davis brings back these images from this year’s annual Farm Aid concert.
If you are in the Madison area, The Progressive will be hosting a fortieth-anniversary screening of the Academy Award-nominated documentary film The War At Home. The film, which premiered on October 12, 1979 in Madison, Wisconsin, chronicles the history of the anti-Vietnam War movement through the lens on one Midwestern city. The film has been newly restored and will show for one night only at Madison’s Orpheum Theater on Sunday October 13 at 6 pm, followed by a panel discussion titled “The War At Home—then and now.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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