The Dems Are Ready to Impeach

Should the Dems take control of the House this Fall, impeachment procedings will begin as soon as Rep. John Conyers takes his seat at the head of the House Judiciary Committee. So says Byron York in a piece at National Review:

There’s a word you won’t find in the text of Democratic Rep. John Conyers’s new “investigative report” on the Bush administration, “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance.” And the word is…impeachment. Yet the 350-page “Constitution in Crisis,” released last week, is, more than anything else, a detailed road map for the impeachment of George W. Bush, ready for use should Democrats win control of the House of Representatives this November. And Conyers, who would become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — the panel that would initiate any impeachment proceedings — is the man who could make it happen.

While it’s absent in the body of the report, the I-word does appear a few times in Conyers’s 1,401 footnotes, which include citations of authorities ranging from the left-wing conspiracy website rawstory.com to the left-wing antiwar sites democracyrising.us and afterdowningstreet.org to the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian to the left-wing magazines The Nation and Mother Jones to the left-wing blogosphere favorite Murray Waas to the New York Times columnists Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich to former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh. (Sources for “The Constitution in Crisis” even include one story co-written by the disgraced Internet writer Jason Leopold.) Relying on such material, Conyers has created what might be called the definitive left-wing blogger’s history of the Bush administration. “I would like to thank the ‘blogosphere’ for its myriad and invaluable contributions to me and my staff,” Conyers writes in the report’s introduction. “Absent the assistance of ‘blogs’ and other Internet-based media, it would have been impossible to assemble all of the information, sources and other materials necessary to the preparation of this report.”

But Conyers’s report is more than the world’s longest blog post. Far more seriously, it is the foundation for possible articles of impeachment, detailing charge after charge against the president. “Approximately 26 laws and regulations may have been violated by this administration’s misconduct,” Conyers wrote Friday in a message posted simultaneously on the DailyKos and Huffington Post websites. “The report…compiles the accumulated evidence that the Bush administration has thumbed its nose at our nation’s laws, and the Constitution itself.”

A few months ago, when there was speculation that Democrats planned to impeach Bush if they won the House, the party’s leadership moved quickly to stop the discussion. In May, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told the Washington Post that Pelosi had told her fellow Democrats “impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it.” But Conyers, who would likely be the single-most important person in the undertaking, was never on board. “There’s no way I can predict whether there will ultimately be an impeachment proceeding underway or not,” he said last week in an interview with the liberal website tpmmmuckraker.com. “The Constitution in Crisis” is Conyers’s sign that, should the opportunity arise, he is ready to go.

We can expect two years of hearings, acrimony and gridlock in the House. Even if they manage to vote articles of impeachment (and that's by no means certain), any charges would die in the Senate due to a lack of votes to convict. The whole thing would be a charade, and given the public's revulsion to the Clinton impeachment hearings and subsequent trial (even if they didn't like Clinton a lot of folks objected to the impeachment), I'm not sure the Dems would really benefit from all this.

Conyers has held all kinds of wacky hearings on his own. You can imagine what it will be like if he holds the gavel in the House Judiciary Committee. First witness - Cindy Sheehan.