I just read Michelle Goldberg's piece,
Bush's impeachable offense, in Salon today, in which she evaluates the case for impeaching Bush and assesses the chances of it happening in this Republican controlled climate.
She quotes Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, as saying, "I think if we're going to be intellectually honest here, this really is the kind of thing that Alexander Hamilton was referring to when impeachment was discussed."
Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean called Bush "the first president to admit to an impeachable offense."
Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. John Lewis have called for impeachment hearings, and
Sen. Feingold has already said President Bush broke the law.
Goldberg also quotes:
Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, who testified to Congress in favor of Bill Clinton's impeachment:
"The fact is, the federal law is perfectly clear," Turley says. "At the heart of this operation was a federal crime. The president has already conceded that he personally ordered that crime and renewed that order at least 30 times. This would clearly satisfy the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors for the purpose of an impeachment."
Finally, the most conservative voice in this debate that I've seen:
Similar fears are voiced by Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. Fein is very much a member of the right. He once published a column arguing that "President George W. Bush should pack the United States Supreme Court with philosophical clones of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and defeated nominee Robert H. Bork."
Suddenly, though, Fein is talking about Bush as a threat to America. "President Bush presents a clear and present danger to the rule of law," he wrote in the right-wing Washington Times on Dec. 20. "He cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses. Congress should swiftly enact a code that would require Mr. Bush to obtain legislative consent for every counterterrorism measure that would materially impair individual freedoms."
What alarms Fein is not only that Bush has broken laws but also that he has repeatedly shown contempt for the separation of powers. Fein wants to see congressional hearings that would explore whether Bush accepts any constitutional limitation on his own authority.
Goldberg concludes that impeachment is highly unlikely. I think she is probably correct now, but this does not take into account the effects of the Abramoff scandal, which may be about to blow wide open into the biggest congressional scandal in memory.
With spygate, the Libby case (which will hopefully ensnare Rove and Cheney), the Abramoff case, and many others, '06 will be our best hope for tipping the scales back in our direction.
How do you all think these scandals will help our chances of holding President Bush accountable for his endless list of failures?