The "I" Word

There’s something happening on the impeachment front much more significant than the municipal initiatives in California and Vermont.

On December 18, 2005, Rep John Conyers of Michigan, a Democratic congressman with four decades of tenure introduced a resolution requesting the House to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Seven other members of the House signed on as co-sponsors.

It’s unlikely at this point that the Conyers resolution will be any more influential than the Newfane, Vermont City Council in tilting the House toward initiating actual impeachment proceedings. However, Conyers has other reasons besides naïve hope for introducing this measure. The main one is, in the congressman’s words, “To take away the excuse that we didn’t know.”

Sometime in the future, people are going to hold the present-day members of Congress accountable. They’ll ask, “What the hell were you doing when Bush suspended the Constitution and took the country into a disastrous war on false pretenses?” Conyers and his co-sponsors want to be on record.

Quoted in Lewis Lapham’s Harper’s article “The Case for Impeachment” in this month’s (March) issue, Conyers asks, “What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news.”

The 182-page, heavily-footnoted report Conyers’s staff has produced is based on information found in hundreds of open and publicly-available sources such as newspaper stories, television broadcasts, magazine articles, and sworn testimony before both houses of Congress. Its rationale for impeachment includes the entire catalog of high crimes and misdemeanors the administration has committed since 9/11 – illegal spying and wiretapping, violation of the Geneva Conventions, and the illegal detention and torture of terror suspects real and imagined – but it concentrates mainly on the lies and deliberate deceptions that were foisted on Congress and the public during the highly choreographed prelude to the Iraq War.

“That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq,” Lapham writes, “is a fact not open to dispute.”

This past Monday, Conyers, Lapham, and a number of others took their push for impeachment, or at least the serious discussion of it, to the airwaves with a forum on C-Span. I don’t have cable where I’m staying right now, so I couldn’t watch it.

House Resolution 635 isn’t likely to go anywhere in the near future. But in uncertain and turbulent times, circumstances can change enormously, sometimes very quickly. You never know. Six months from now, Bush and Cheney may be looking at impeachment with real fear and real astonishment.