I hate to be the one to break the news

If you've spent much virtually any time over at Big Orange the last few weeks, you'll likely have come across at least one diary on the (drumroll, please) Impeachment Question. The question has devolved into something roughly approximating "Are you fer it or agin' it?" And heaven help you if your answer even vaguely looks like "Agin' it."

I swear, impeachment is like some incredibly addictive new drug. One whiff of it, and all critical reasoning ability goes straight out of your head. I see many of the same tricks and tactics that our side has derided when they came from the Shrubbery or the Mighty Wurlitzer or the Vast Right-Wing Noise Machine now being played by our side, against our side. As I commented in just one of the myriad of such diaries, is it any wonder that the crest of the progressive left is (or should be) a circular firing squad on a blood-red background?

Before I get too far along in this rant, I want to get a few things absolutely, positively, 100%, no-possible-mistake-about-it clear. First and foremost among those is this: I would like nothing better in life (well, almost nothing) than to see at least 67 Aye votes in the United States for the conviction of George W. Bush, the man who will go down in history books as the worst president in this nation's history to date. Second, either after his impeachment or in place of it, I would happily settle for video footage of the Boy Who Would Be King, clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, boarding a military transport under guard for extradition to the Hague on war crimes charges. Failing that, I'd settle for multiple federal prosecutions for as many of the offenses that Bush has almost certainly committed.

All that said, I have some bad news. There is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Tooth Fairy, and George W. Bush is almost certainly not going to be impeached before leaving office. It's also possible that he may never even be indicted for any of the crimes he has committed. Follow me below the fold, and I'll have even more heretical views for your reading pleasure.

The sad and simple facts of the matter are these. It takes a simple majority in the House to impeach. I don't think we have the votes to make that happen. There are almost certainly Democrats who would refuse to vote articles of impeachment, and I don't believe there are enough Republicans who would agree to do so to tip the balance in our favor. But even if we assume, argumentis causa, that we could get an impeachment in the House, there's no way on earth or in heaven that we'd be able to round up the 67 votes we'd need to convict in the Senate. Let me remind everybody that we have a one-seat majority in the upper chamber, and that by courtesy of Holy Joe Lieberman, who is only Bush's favorite Democrat-in-name-only in the whole wide world. Think he'd vote with us to convict? I think he'd be more likely to order a Whopper rare in the middle of Passover than to vote to convict Bush of anything more serious than failing to slip him a little tongue the last time he kissed him. (And if you'll pardon me for a moment, I need to go find a bit of mental Clorox to get that image out of my head.) Here, too, I think we'd have a hard enough time getting all the Democrats to vote with us, let alone attracting enough Republicans to get to the two-thirds majority prescribed by the Constitution.

All of those facts are so much grass to the crowd I've come to call the impeach-o-philes. Matter of fact, I think they've been smoking that grass, that's how illogical their arguments have been in response to the points I've raised. In their bizarre world, apparently Republicans are just falling all over themselves to desert the man they worked super-hard to get elected twice in the last eight years--or they would be, if we'd just believe with sufficient fervor.

Here's another hard truth to bear. Tinkerbell is dead. And so are Bush's chances of being impeached.

Another common criticism that I have raised (along with numerous others) is that there simply isn't anything like the popular uproar against Bush that there was, say, against Richard Nixon 30-odd years ago. This fact, too, is cavalierly dismissed with airy wavings of the hand and reassurances that if the pee-pul only knew how rotten to the core Bush really is, they'd be howling for his head in the streets in no time. Because, you see, nobody in the whole wide world has said a single discouraging word about our Dear Leader at any time since he first took office. The Tinkerbell factor gets heavy play here, too. I have pointed out more than once that while yes, Bush's approval ratings are still circling the bottom of the toilet bowl, and the conventional wisdom is that his Iraq war plan would have been put to better use as toilet paper, none of that seems to have affected the popular support for his impeachment. The last poll I saw, sometime last week, suggested that around 40% of respondents favored impeaching Bush, and 42% of respondents didn't. To me, that looks like a wash. A statistical dead heat. I don't realistically see those numbers moving much in the course of the next two years, barring some galactically stupid fuckup on Bush's part. It could happen, but I wouldn't care to bet much on it.

With all of that being the case, or at least plausibly close to being the case, it seems to me that impeaching Bush is a colossal waste of our time, our tax dollars, and our scarce resources of political capital when what we should be doing is working our butts off to rebuild the nation, the economy, the infrastructure, and everything else that the Shrubbery has carelessly broken or criminally neglected the last six years. We weren't given a mandate to indulge our private fantasies of vengeance: we won the elections this year because people were asking for a change from politics as usual--which of late has meant the politics of personal destruction. We squander that mandate at our political peril.

More importantly, however, even if we could impeach Bush (which we can't), we have far more important things to accomplish, and a very limited time frame in which to accomplish them. If we start right out of the gate with impeachment proceedings, we lose valuable time that we will almost certainly never get back. We look like a bunch of whiny-ass losers, just as the Republicans have tried to paint us for lo! these many years. Not to mention the fact that Bush is a lame duck on greased skids that are quickly shuffling him off into the obscurity he so richly deserves. What, exactly, would we accomplish by accelerating that process, even if we could? (And of course, we can't.)

The impeach-o-philes all seem to think that Bush's crimes are self-evident. And to some extent at least some of them are--if you're a political junkie and have been plugged in to all the sources of information these last six years. But even that doesn't amount to a hill of beans in a court of law. And while an impeachment isn't really anything like a criminal trial, there are at least similar evidentiary standards. Right now, we've got bupkes. We have a bunch of suppositions and allegations, but no real hard facts to back them up and that we could rely on in court. So we're going to have to investigate. Now, Congress is not known for moving at warp speed, even when Congress and the president are on the same side and agree with one another about the proper course of action. Anybody seen any evidence of that in Washington the last six years? I sure haven't.

That means the investigative process, once it gets started, is going to be a long drawn-out affair. The impeach-o-philes seem to think that all we have to do is toss a subpoena duces tecum onto the chief of staff's desk, and the Shrubbery will collapse under the weight of its own rottenness. I'd love to see that happen, but this isn't a fairy tale, so I'm not counting on it. Even a truly hacktackular criminal defense lawyer shyster will advise his or her clients to throw up as many procedural and evidentiary roadblocks, motions, petitions, requests for summary judgement, and every other trick in the federal rules of criminal procedure, the better to delay the opening of their trial. Now imagine what the Bush White House is likely to do when faced with a similar situation, and with the money and connections to hire all of the best lawyers money can buy. If we had gotten an answer, by the time the Shrubbery left the White House, to the first question asked in the first deposition, I'd be amazed.

The safer (politically) and more efficient (morally and legally) course of action, it seems to me, is to initiate inquiries into alleged misconduct by the Bush administration. Give them sufficient resources to get the job done and done well, but do it as background, rather than making it the showpiece of the new Democratic leadership in Congress. Assuming (again, argumentis causa) that the investigations turn up some actual, provable criminal acts at some future point, then we can maybe talk about impeachment--or, more probably, about criminal prosecutions, given that Bush will probably be out of office by that point, and also no longer protected by sovereign immunity.

Really, we can do that without pissing on the rule of law, or laughing in the face of our moral responsibility to combat evil. Prosecutors have discretion about when--and whether--to file charges, even for the most heinous of crimes. If doing so will potentially prejudice or jeopardize another, more significant or more important prosecution, they will often let things slide by, that the greater good may be obtained. So too, I would argue, with impeachment. If we can, by some miracle, get it, then hallelujah and pass the popcorn. But if we can't, and I would argue that we really can't without said miracle, then we shouldn't waste our time on trying to make it happen. Focus on governing well and doing the people's business. There will be plenty of time to indict Bush for high crimes and misdemeanours after he's left office in ignominy anyway.

Comments

[Kevin Roth]

Hey Mike, its Kevin from class. Like your blog. Thought you might find this link interesting and funny. After your done laughing at the front page, click on the author and laugh some more.

http://www.dupagepress.com/COD/index.php?id=1294

Enjoy your break and I'll see you around.

:D

[Incertus]

It's gotten to the point over at Kos that I rarely spend time in the diaries anymore, especially after that last one where clonecone was called an appeaser. I've considered, more than once, putting up a diary asking the pro-impeachment when they'll be satisfied that it's not going to happen, so I can just come back on that date, but I figure it's not worth the grief I'll get for doing it.

[Michael]

Yeah, I saw you getting taken to task in one of the umpty bajillion impeachment threads the other day. When Hunter threw up the first "Tell us what you want in the new model" diary, I put my two cents' worth in and said I wanted a "Smite this diary!" button and an ignore list. At least then I don't actually have to look at all the stuff I know is just going to raise my blood pressure.

[Incertus]

An ignore list would be nice. There's one at another forum I haunt, and while I use it rarely, I do use it, and it helps me keep my blood pressure at reasonable levels.

And since there's yet another one up today, again on the rec list, again falsely equating impeachment with investigation, I guess I'd better stay away.

Or write the damn diary.

[Andrew Davey]

Wow! You said it so well:
The relentless pursuit of impeachment would be such a waste of our resources, when there are so many other things that our Dems should be doing next year!

Still, I like your idea of criminal prosecutions after Bush leaves office...
Let's hit him hard AFTER he's lost all his office privileges.

Thanks for trying to offer reason to the "IMPEACH NOW!" crowd...
I especially appreciated the comment you left on my DKos diary last week. : )