Bush and Impeachment

I've been reading a lot about impeachment lately. There are a number of interesting books on the subject -- Charles Black Jr.'s Impeachment: A Handbook and Raoul Berger's Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems only the two most obvious -- and there are reasons today to think about what is usually considered an unthinkable subject.

Eleanor Clift in her Newsweek column mentions that Democrats on Capitol Hill are actually starting to grow a spine:

"Democrats feel emboldened, and they’re dropping the euphemisms. They’re saying straight out that the president and his administration lied and manufactured evidence to take the country to war. The logical extension of such an explosive charge would be impeachment, says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council, though Wittman doesn’t personally advocate this strategy. “It’s the highest crime and misdemeanor one can think of, the case that they maliciously did this, and it obliges Democrats [who backed the war] to say they cast the wrong vote.” Wittmann is sharply critical of the administration’s performance in Iraq, but he supported the invasion and thinks Democrats would be ill-advised to drag the country into impeachment proceedings."

Ill-advised? Offhand I can think of at least 2,000 reasons why impeaching this president would be, as Oliver North once said in a somewhat different context, a neat idea.

Clift continues:

"The more we learn about the secretive White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and the role of Vice President Dick Cheney in pressing his dark views on the country, the likelier it is that the administration will be found culpable for exaggerating the threat Saddam Hussein posed in its zeal to go to war. If the Democrats win back the House in the ’06 election, Michigan Democrat John Conyers will chair the House Judiciary committee. On the day the Scooter Libby indictments were handed down, Conyers invoked the language of Watergate: “What did the president and the vice president know, and when did they know it?” If the political tables turn, impeachment may not be so far-fetched after all."

Far-fetched? Not bloody likely, as my cousins across the pond would say.

Whether or not Bush is impeached depends almost entirely, as Clift says, on how the Democrats do in the midterm elections next year. If, as I fervently hope, the Democrats win back the House and Senate by convincing majorities, then I think impeachment is a virtual certainty. But whether Bush is removed from office, as he deserves to be, will depend on whether the Republican senators decide to back him up or cut him loose.

Democratic senators stood by President Clinton, so he survived impeachment. President Nixon was abandoned by Republican senators (Barry Goldwater told Nixon to his face that he couldn't count on more than a dozen votes to acquit in a Senate trial), so he was forced to resign rather than be removed from office.

Right now I think the odds are at least 50/50 that Bush will be impeached in the next two years. But impeachment is not enough for this president. He deserves to be the first president to be removed from office in disgrace for the crimes he has committed in office.

So read Black and Berger on the subject. Make sure you go to the polls in 2006.

And if your Senator is a Republican, make sure you get in touch with him or her via e-mail or snail-mail and let them know exactly what you think of this administration and the way they lied this country into war. And what you think they should do about it.

Tom Moran