Plenty of good drama played out at the Statehouse today. The Senate approved the governor's education spending cap in a well-scripted piece that featured the lieutenant governor breaking the tie vote. I wasn't there for it - my co-worker Nancy covered that one - but it sounds like everybody stuck to their roles perfectly.

Another scene I did catch was in the Cedar Creek Room, where about 100 Vermonters who want to see President Bush and Vice President Cheney impeached bantered with, questioned, lectured and yelled at House Speaker Gaye Symington and Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin for about 45 minutes.

Ten-year-old Jackson Bressor of Richmond stepped forward in the crowd and asked, "Isn't democracy showing the views of the people?"

Jackson is a fifth-grader who skipped school to come to the Statehouse with his father.
"I came to really try to have the Legislature notice us," said Jackson, who gets fired up talking about the president's handling of the war in Iraq, wiretapping and torture.

Like others in the crowd, Jackson found the event emotionally gripping - that so many people had come from all over Vermont to speak so passionately about this issue to the leaders of the Legislature.

"Being able to speak to Gaye and Peter really let out a lot," he said, referring to them by their first names so you got the impression that along with wiretapping, the Vermont Legislature is a common topic around the Bressor dinner table. "Just to be able to talk to them. I'm really glad I came to this."

Fifty-three-year-old Kurt Daims, a retired engineer from Brattleboro wearing a red beret, was taken by the power of the people too. "I was on the verge of tears," he said.

This sense that they were working the muscles of democracy came even though Symington and Shumlin were flatly telling the crowd that they could not justify taking the time to debate impeachment. These particular people were all for the Legislature spending a few hundred thousand dollars to extend the legislative session, but hordes of people outside the Statehouse would be less eager to see that.

Symington told them she believes that even in Congress impeachment proceedings would suck up all the energy and divert attention away from getting the U.S. out of Iraq. This crowd wasn't buying that argument. "The best way to get him out of Iraq is to impeach him," Daims yelled from the cluster of people.

"I just think that's weird," Jackson said afterward of Symington's argument.

Shumlin and Symington did, however, remind the group that a single legislator could bring up the resolution and force a vote on whether it should be heard.

Sen. Dick McCormack, a Democrat from Windsor County whose been called the Senate's most liberal member, was the only legislator lurking in the crowd of pro-impeachment folks. He said afterward they might just have left him with no choice but to push for the resolution. "I've been shamed into it," he said. "These people are right. I wish they'd go away. Their refusal to go away means you have to confront the fact that they're right."

- Terri Hallenbeck