I have not seen this spelled out so plainly before today:
The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.
“A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment,” an administration source said.
Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Insight is, as reported by my twin brother, a conservative magazine, so this is an interesting bit of buzz.
This does raise the question in my mind of whether or not this would be a good thing for the country. There’s a part of me that thinks “We gotta get this guy out of office, by any means necessary.” Full stop.
There’s another part of me that thinks that beginning impeachment proceedings against two Presidents in a row sets a really, really, really bad precedent. Of course, I think that part of the reason that this is possible has nothing to do with the current culpability level of George Bush, but with the way that the political process and the discourse of the country was perverted during the Clinton Administration. This is, inevitably, the payback for letting the Right Wing Noise Machine run amok- first we get the demonization of the Clinton Presidency, then the Imperial Presidency that results from the breakdown of checks and balances on the Executive Branch.
So, yes, the system is broken, and we know exactly who broke it. However, my concern (and I hate to be the one throwing cold water on this, since I personally would not lose any sleep seeing Bush and his cronies in leg irons at the next Nuremberg Trials) is that once we break the system fully, what will rush in to take its place? Will it be good for the country or not?
We have the wolf by the ears now, don’t we?