It never fails. Whenever an impeachment diary get more than a handful of comments, foremost among the reasons offered is the notion that it won't happen because, somehow, Democratic Congressmembers are "complicit" with the crimes and misinformation that form the basis of the charges that warrant impeachment. We see this even now with clammyc's excellent diary on the recommended list exhorting us to not allow our Representatives to ignore evidence that the Bush administration ordered the forgery of intelligence documents to justify our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Seriously, people, just stop it.
This is the dumbest argument I've ever heard. Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, it's true. Let's assume that most or all of the current Democratic Leadership in the House and Senate, as well as many lower-ranking members, conspired with Republicans and the Bush Administration to get us into a war whose sole design and effect was to simultaneously tighten world oil supplies and funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to private war contractors, all in order to radically increase the already ludicrous profit margins of the energy and war industries. Mission accomplished for the most pervasive and insidious conspiracy ever to have plagued the world.
Now what? By any reasonable estimation, the Iraq Debacle is a political nightmare. Regardless of whatever else it has accomplished, championing the occupation has been the political downfall of the Bush Administration and the Republican party in general. Gone are Rove's dreams of a permanent Republican majority. The remaining co-conspirators of this political debacle have no remaining reason to remain aligned with the ostensible figureheads of this disastrous policy. The profits for their pet industries and private buddies have been secured. Far from tying them to the Administration, participating in, or even championing an impeachment against Bush and/or Cheney would have the political effect of finally and definitively divorcing them from the political fallout of their alignment with the war, regardless of what else come out about their involvement in getting us in. Remember the Keating 5 scandal? John McCain managed to retool his reputation by championing campaign finance reform after being found to have been a participant in a political kick-back conspiracy. Nothing suggests the same thing wouldn't happen to co-conspirators in the Iraq Debacle if they jumped on the impeachment bandwagon.
In fact, I can just see the faux hand-wringing now. "Of course we were behind Bush in the beginning," they'll say. "He was the President of the United States! Who could have imagined that he would behave so nefariously?" Alberto Gonzolas, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and even Dick Cheney, the dark lord himself, would substantially improve their public image by giving information and participating in Congressional investigations that would make impeachment a "slam-dunk." Even some on this site would no doubt be offering muted praise, and perhaps even not so muted, were they to do this.
Part of the problem with why this "explanation" for the lack of movement on the impeachment front has the sort of seductiveness it has is because far too many people here see impeachment as some sort of criminal trial. Part of the problem stems from the Constitutional mandate for impeachment in the case of "High Crimes, Misdemeanors and Treason." But in truth, impeachment is an entirely political affair. There are no criminal penalties for conviction (or failing to convict), only political ones. Their's no jail time or fines attached to conviction, nor any mandate that criminal proceedings follow successful conviction of an impeachment. If you're convicted, you're out of office. That's it. If the conviction fails, then the Senators who sat as jurors at the trial must face the political consequences of that failure with their constituents. They don't get charged with "false arrest" or "malicious prosecution." The Judicial branch has only a marginal role to play in impeachment proceedings, and this role is only to ensure a process to be followed. But if impeachment were a criminal affair, co-conspirators would have a positive reason not to engage in it, so they don't become criminally liable. Criminal liability is notoriously difficult to mitigate, seeing as how the definitions of crime and the penalties for committing it are written into law. But the only liability here is a political liability, and political liabilities are much more easily managed. Past political transgressions can be forgiven or forgotten by well known techniques of distraction.
And there are far better reasons for thinking impeachment's not going to go anywhere than thinking that our Democratic congresscritters are complicit. Thus far, the only evidence that warrants the pursuit of impeachment is circumstantial, though there are mountains of it. Without clear and (if you'll excuse the pun) unimpeachable evidence of Bush's criminality, this remains an issue over whether merely very bad policy is a reason to impeach someone. The political climate is still such that a partisan pursuit of impeachment would cloud the issue and the election. Independents, that large class of people who are best described as apolitical, simply lack the time or the interest in sorting through the flurry of contradictory and irrelevant claims that would surely result from its pursuit. It would be all too easy to paint it as some sort of revenge on the impeachment and failed conviction of President Clinton. While it would rally the Democratic base, it would also rally the Republican base, and since there are no legislative implications that come from impeachment, no roads or clinics are built or funded, no ghettos improved, no new grants or loans for small businesses, and no tweaking of the tax code to benefit the middle class, it would literally be seen by many as a waste of time. Better to keep the political issue here very clear. The Iraq War was disastrous policy, and even the know-nothing-about-politics independents agree with that. Pursuing impeachment clouds that issue.
Now, I don't want you coming away from this diary thinking I don't want to see Bush and Cheney impeached for the crimes against the Constitution they have committed. I very much want to see that, for all the reasons clammyc and others state in their excellent pro-impeachment diaries. Letting a President get away with this sets a terrible precedent. And I also think that the pursuit of clearly bad policies, especially when all the evidence of their badness is clear and present, is certainly an impeachable offense. I also think it would be good politics leading into the election (regardless of whether a conviction is secured) with but one assumption: that clear and undeniable evidence of Bush's criminality can be found and easily presented to the public. But at this point, since no such evidence has been made public, I might suggest a different tactic. Contact your Republican Representatives and persuade, threaten, cajole, and bribe them into supporting it. Any amount of bi-partisan Congressional support for impeachment at all puts this issue on an entirely different political playing field. I suggest starting with the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee.
Finally, I want to suggest that such cynicism regarding our own members of Congress falls too easily into the trap set for us by the Reagan Revolution; the notion that members of either party are basically the same, that you can't trust any of them, and that government, in general, is the problem. The best and brightest, not to mention all-around smartest people in our country are Democrats. That alone tells you there's a difference. Let's not be intellectually lazy when it comes to judging our political leaders.