AH, SPRING. Snow melts, flowers bloom, and a Democrat’s fancy turns to thoughts of impeachment.
Seriously. The Impeach Bush movement has made great strides over the last few years, and today impeachment isn’t just a looming carnival of the absurd, quacking and clanging about on the horizon–it’s a real possibility for 2007.
The effort to impeach the President began in the summer of 2003. Ralph Nader was one of the first to call for it, and he claimed that Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was moving in the same direction. At the time, Conyers’ staff denied it, with one of his senior aides saying, in February 2003, that Conyers “wasn’t contemplating anything like that.”
Nader was ahead of the curve. Back then, impeachment was the province of cranks. The “movement” was largely driven by Ramsey Clark and Francis Boyle, a professor of law at the University of Illinois who had previously agitated for the impeachment of the first President Bush. Impeachment was so far out of the mainstream that even Lyndon LaRouche disavowed it, claiming it would be “tantamount to treason against the entire human race” (if only because it would leave Dick Cheney in the Oval Office).
But then came May 2005 and the “Downing Street memos.” A month later, a Zogby International poll showed that 42 percent of respondents agreed that Bush should be impeached if it was found that he lied about Iraq. Encouraged by this news, the Democratic group AfterDowningStreet.org raised $10,000 and began commissioning impeachment polls. In November 2005, it paid for a Zogby poll asking if Americans would consider impeachment. It wasn’t the most objectively worded question, but never mind that: 53 percent of respondents said yes.
And so, believing that a clear majority of America now favored impeachment–because, of course Bush lied, QED–proponents began declaring their cause not only righteous but also politically prudent.
On Dec. 18, 2005, Rep. Conyers reconsidered and introduced HRs 636 and 637, which seek to censure the President and vice president, and HR 635, which seeks, more grandly, to create “a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of prewar intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Today that measure has 29 Democratic cosponsors.
By contrast, Conyers’ less severe resolutions have attracted fewer supporters, with only 15 Democrats signing on to censure Bush (16 for Cheney). But that movement found its champion last week in Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wis.), who introduced a Senate resolution to censure Bush. Mind you, these two goals, censure and impeachment, are not mutually exclusive. As Feingold put it, censure is only a “first step” toward holding the President accountable for his “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Most senior Democrats have attempted to remain noncommittal about censure and impeachment. They are waiting to see which way the wind blows.
The answer may be found at the local level. So far, 11 town councils have taken up resolutions supporting impeachment; eight have passed, the largest being in San Francisco. State Democratic parties have adopted similar resolutions in California, Nevada and Wisconsin. ImpeachPAC, a political-action committee devoted to supporting pro-impeachment candidates, lists 14 Democratic candidates mounting congressional campaigns centering on impeachment. One of them, Carl Sheeler, who is running for the Senate in Rhode Island, recently paid for a billboard along Interstate 95 that reads: “Be Patriotic, Impeach Bush.” He says he has received an overwhelmingly positive response.
It would be easy to dismiss impeachment as a quixotic fringe movement, yet that would be a mistake. The odds are at least even that Democrats will win the House in 2006. That would make Conyers chairman of the Judiciary Committee, free to push through resolutions and hold hearings as he sees fit.
Feingold is running for president, and as he reaps political gains from the base by pushing for censure (with the possibility of impeachment), other Democratic contenders will gravitate toward his position. Remember that in 2003 the Democratic field was uniformly pro-war until Howard Dean made hay from the antiwar movement, causing the serious candidates to vacillate.
Impeachment is still in the distance, but make no mistake: Eventually the circus is coming to town.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard and a weekly op-ed contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer. This essay originally appeared in the March 12, 2006 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
