Impeachment: A Remedy, But Not a Movement.

There's a lot of rage that the Democratic leadership in Congress is not pursuing impeachment full steam ahead. While impeaching the President is right on the merits, and while we owe it to our Constitution to vindicate it from the Bush administration's lies and obfuscations, impeachment is far from symbolic. It's a battle that, if we fight, we must win. And just as importantly, it's one that we should not start until we're certain that we can win.

To begin with, it's obvious the President's committed impeachable offenses. To even engage in the dog and pony show of "investigating" whether or not the warrantless wiretaps the President has authorized violate FISA is really absurd, because the President has basically admitted to behavior that violates a plain reading of the law at issue. The only debate that would need to be had would be not over his conduct but the right wing legal theories that the President uses to justify his position, which is in the end unjustifiable. So, so long as we are in agreement that felonious warrantless wiretapping constitutes a high crime, then legally speaking conviction on at least one article of impeachment is a no-brainer. But unfortunately, "legally speaking" is not the end of the story.

I'm not even convinced that there would be actual political negative consequences for individual politicians who advocate impeachment, considering the President's support has sunk so low and the Republicans are trying so hard to distance themselves from him.

But that's not the only danger of impeachment. Basically I agree with the Democrats' congressional leadership. And I do so for reasons you've all heard before, but I'll repeat again. The party has to demonstrate its first concern is with making the lives of ordinary people better, pursuing the now very familiar laundry list of issues: raising the minimum wage; cutting federal student loan interest rates and improving access to higher education; fixing Medicare Part D and providing affordable health care to more Americans; curbing some of the worst abuses of the lobbying system; establishing real energy security for America. And above all else, extricating us from Iraq.

Accomplishing all this becomes less likely if the next Congress begins with a drive to impeachment that encourages the Republicans in Congress and the White House to obstruct the Democrats with all their might even as it soaks up public attention and lets the Republicans off the hook for the very real disorder they've left the country in.

Moreover, it would allow the Republicans to credibly assert that the Democrats are putting vengeance and political gamesmanship first. Of course, the only reason this is an actual threat is because the Republicans have spent their twelve years running Congress on precisely vengeance and political gamesmanship (in addition to graft), and so it seems totally reasonable to the vital slice of middle-of-the-roaders that maybe all politicians are this way, and rule-or-ruin is the way both Democrats and Republicans work.

We have to prove we're about something better, something more.

But even this is not all. There's actually a far more persuasive argument for not pursuing impeachment just yet, one that takes for granted (as I do) that we are dealing with a supremely impeachable president and that the sooner George W. Bush can be lawfully removed from office, the better.

If we go forward with impeachment now it would be very unlikely we could convict (It requires 67 votes in the Senate. Look at the current roster of Republican Senators and tell me there are at least twelve names who under the current circumstances would vote to convict George W. Bush--Mel Martinez? Chuck Grassley? Kay Bailey Hutchison?--Don't be silly.)

So if we push for impeachment immediately we will find at the end of the process that, having spent our silver bullet of impeachment, the powers of the executive would be in W's hands for two years. And it would be unimaginable to impeach a sitting President twice, no matter how much the grinning little fucker actually deserves it.

But now imagine if Iraq plays out as it now seems likely: the administration ignores the ISG proposals, the Democrats try to rein in the administration using the Congress's spending power under the Constitution, and the administration citing its favorite far-right legal theorists bucks the Congress. And all this occurs in the context of a growing consensus among Democrats and moderate Republicans that the Iraq war is an ever-worsening disaster that isolates the White House and makes the President more unpopular inside the beltway and out than he is even now.

At that point, having a slam-dunk case for impeachment--even on a matter unrelated to Iraq such as the FISA issue--becomes a priceless trump card in an Iraq-driven constitutional crisis. (And it's important to keep in mind how likely constitutional crises are, and I really do mean crises, plural, considering the attitude the administration has thus far taken to Congressional oversight and the radical notions of executive power it's articulated).

So the impeachment question is really more than just whether we set out to do this now and how far we should go in pursuing it now. It's how to use this potential deus ex machina we've been given. Because if we use it when the time is not ripe, we get nothing for it but a show of hands in the House and Senate for who there still believes in the Constitution and the rule of law, with probably pitiful results. But if we save it for the right moment, then not only will we win, but Bush can begin planning his presidential library from inside federal prison.

Personally, I'm for the latter.

My point is simple. Impeachment requires a strategy. Crucial to that strategy is timing. The beginning of the new Congress is the precise wrong time. A national crisis caused by the intransigence of a flagrantly lawless executive (and does anyone really doubt that's where we're headed?) is the precise right one.