Hartford lawyer challenging Larson

Spurred in large part by the refusal of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to impeach President George Bush, a Hartford lawyer is challenging the congressman who serves Bristol.
“If the executive commits a crime, he’s got to be punished for it,” said Steve Fournier, who plans to run on the Green Party slate in the 1st District.
U.S. Rep. John Larson, an East Hartford Democrat who has routinely won easy reelection, has offered harsh criticism of Bush’s handling of the Iraq war and the president’s stance on civil liberties issues. But he has stopped short of calling for Bush’s impeachment.
Fournier, a Vietnam-era veteran who lives in Hartford, said there’s a growing movement to stop Bush’s trampling of the Constitution and insisted Larson should get behind it.
“I love the guy, but he’s not doing his job,” Fournier said. “He has to be taken out.”
In response to a call by Greater Hartford Impeach, a group that includes Fourtier, Larson said that he believes “that to knowingly move forward with an impeachment that cannot succeed would only serve political purposes, vindicate the President and not serve our rule of law."
Fourtier, not surprisingly, has a different opinion.
On one of his blogs, Fourtier wrote that “there is little question” that the Judiciary Committee could “establish criminal liability in connection with the stated rationale for war, the politicization of federal prosecutions, spying on Americans, torturing prisoners, holding prisoners without trial, malfeasance as commander-in-chief, and any of the dozens of other crimes committed openly and brazenly by our chief executive officers.”
Greater Hartford Impeach sent Larson a dozen questions to try to pin the congressman down on the impeachment issue, a move endorsed last week by former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.
In his answer to the group, Larson told it, "Your patriotic duty and call for immediate action from Congress are not unjustified.”
"I believe we must restore a system of checks and balances in our federal government and reassert the authority of Congress,” he said, but added that GOP opposition would make it tough.
Fourtier said that “if Larson's logic had prevailed in 1945, Hermann Goering might have lived out his days comfortably in New Jersey.”
“We asked Larson explicit questions about criminal conduct at the top of the executive branch and his constitutional duty to hold the wrongdoers accountable, and he parried them with digressions and diversions and answered not a single one,” he said. “It was a cynical response, intellectually dishonest, baldly political, and insulting to anyone who seeks an accounting, which Larson considers an abuse of the constitutional process.”
Larson, who is almost certainly running for reelection, does not yet have a Republican opponent. He has rolled over GOP challengers since winning the 1st District in 1998. He’s represented Bristol since a redistricting in 2002 expanded the size of each of Connecticut’s remaining five congressional districts.
Fournier, 62, said he’s been active in politics since he left the Air Force in 1970 and got involved in the anti-war movement and left-wing politics. In the years since, he said, he’s been a Democrat, a Republican and a Green Party member.
With the exception of a brief stint on the Hartford Board of Education a decade ago, when he helped convince the state to take over Hartford’s troubled public schools, Fournier’s been an activist and outsider.
More information is available on reporter Steve Collins’ Bristol Blog at www.bristolnews.blogspot.com. The election is November 4.

Click here for much more about Fournier and his politics

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Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com