Vermont: Creating Problems on the Cheap

The citizens of Brattleboro, VT, have passed a non-binding referendum proposition directing the Town Attorney to "....draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution...[and]...arrest and detain George Bush and Richard Cheney in Brattleboro....". Sounds good to me: and after Brattleboro is done with them, they can be impeached by Congress, and when that's settled, they can be shipped off to the Hague for a war crimes trial.Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Reaction from certain quarters is predictable:

But a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee denounced the article.

"It appears that the left-wing knows no bounds in their willingness to waste taxpayer dollars to make a futile counterproductive partisan political point," said Blair Latoff. "Town people would be much better served by elected officials who sought to solve problems rather than create them."

First, Brattleboro's "elected officials" haven't done anything yet, and likely never will -- the article is non-binding (and probably non-enforceable). But hypothetically supposing that the town council did act on it, let's do a little arithmetic:

Let's assume that it cost as much as $3000 for the town's lawyer to draw up the indictments.

That is one billionth the amount that certain other "elected officials" (the ones, as it happens, who are the targets of the hypothetical indictment) have spent, or otherwise cost the American taxpayer, to invade Iraq -- and "create a problem" that, one way or another, the whole world will be living with for decades. And that's not even counting several hundred thousand people dead.

But yeah: a few American citizens exercising their democratic right to place a question on the municipal ballot are troublemakers who are "wasting taxpayer dollars to make partisan points" and should just STFU.