Beware, President Bush: Cindy Sheehan, your most famous citizen caviler—the matriarch of “Camp Casey,” that onetime pup-tented protesters’ Hooverville at the gate to your Crawford ranch—has filed papers to run against House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi in November. And if she wins, she says she’s coming for you. She’s promising: “I guarantee he’ll know I’m there.”

Having long talked up her intent to challenge the Democrats’ highest-ranking member of Congress, Sheehan was at San Francisco City Hall on Friday to make it official. She got forms she’ll need to fill with 10,198 signatories to run as an Independent challenger in November. She needs all 10,198 by Aug. 8 to make it onto the ballot.

Sheehan began her antiwar crusade in 2004 after the death of her son, an Army specialist, in Iraq, but it soon metastasized into a crusade against everything Bush, including of late stints overseas in Egypt protesting the trials of Muslim Brotherhood members charged with terrorism—an act even fellow liberals criticized as out of her element and over the top.

For her part, Sheehan is straightforward about why she’s running against Pelosi: The speaker unequivocally tabled the articles of impeachment against Bush that Sheehan wants introduced, mostly on account of the war. Because of this, Sheehan says she’s got a chance; granted, she still recognizes it’s an uphill battle. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that she’s raised $100,000 so far, most of it from donors outside her district. (Not much, admittedly, since she’s been talking of challenging Pelosi since last summer.) “If she becomes a recognized candidate,” the Chronicle story said, “she’ll be challenging one of the best-known and most powerful Democrats in the country in Pelosi, a 10-term incumbent who routinely collects around 80 percent of the vote” in her district.

Sheehan had been on a yearlong “break” from politics, but says she came back in after Bush’s commutation of White House aide Scooter Libby’s prison sentence in July—a final straw of sorts, convincing her “that seeing George Bush impeached would be a victory for humanity.” (An odd campaign platform, since, in the unlikely event that she unseats Pelosi, she will be in office barely two weeks at most before Bush leaves.)

Others doubt the sincerity of other parts of her campaign. She told the Chronicle that she’ll “represent everyone in San Francisco, not just the corporate elite”—which struck critics as a promise to represent everyone but the corporate elite—then added: “I’m working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.”

Of course, there’s some truth to her claim that voters might be disillusioned with Pelosi. Pelosi leads a Congress that has abysmal approval ratings of slightly better than 20 percent. Her district is overwhelmingly left-leaning and sympathetic to ideas like impeachment (even if that would be impossible by January 2009). Plus Pelosi, neutral in the Clinton-Obama race, has found herself in the hot seat lately because of her have-it-both-ways stance on the role of superdelegates, as well as a more ignominious incident where she appears to have “quoted” a passage from Isaiah (one she’s in fact used verbatim for years) that doesn’t exist to encourage the celebration of Earth Day.

Pressure from the congressional Hispanic Caucus has compelled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to kill part of a bill that prevents workers asked to use English on the job from suing their employers for workplace discrimination. The Salvation Army is one employer already embroiled in such a lawsuit from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The amendment — an add-on sponsored by Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander to the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill — passed in the Senate 75-19. The House voted 218-186 earlier this month to instruct its conference negotiators (who would meet with their Senate counterparts to finalize the bill) to approve the amendment.

Now at Pelosi’s bidding — and following a heated exchange on the Senate floor involving Democratic infighting and finger jabbing that John Fund recounts here — that meeting of Senate and House negotiators has been postponed indefinitely. The House Hispanic Caucus predictably told her it was rooted in “bigotry and prejudice” and threatened to kill a larger tax bill over the issue. This comes less than a week after the fallout from Hillary Clinton’s flip-flop on, and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s support of, driver’s licenses for illegal aliens.

“Thousands of small businesses in America will have to hire lawyers, go before a federal agency and argue why there is some special reason for their employees to be required to speak English on the job,” an aide to Sen. Alexander told WoW. “Being an American is based on . . . learning American history and learning our common language, English, so we can talk to one each other, live together and do business with one another.”

It is actually the EEOC’s rules, and not The Salvation Army’s English-only policy, that have shaky legal footing. The former were rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1993 (Garcia v. Spun Steak), while The Salvation Army defeated a lawsuit against its policy in 2003 (Cosme v. The Salvation Army). Moreover, a requirement for U.S. citizenship is proficiency in English.

Fund says the EEOC is undermining that: “The EEOC claimed the [The Salvation Army] had fired two Hispanic employees for continuing to speak Spanish on the job. It said that the firings violated the law because the English-only policy was not ‘relevant’ to job performance or safety. . . . Republicans have their political problems with Hispanics over some of their approaches to illegal immigration, but they may be nothing compared to the problems Democrats have if they continue to cave in to their anti-assimilation extremists.”

An aide to Pelosi, who spoke to WoW on background, downplayed the issue, saying this is partly because the appropriations bill will likely get subsumed by an omnibus bill later this year with other spending measures.