Do they dare to say "impeach"? One person's airtight legal case is another's "stay out the Bushes.".

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Rant

YOU'LL NEVER FIND anyone as impartial, disinterested, judicious, and concerned only with the well-being of the American people as a party hack laying into a politician from a rival party. Thus the case for the impeachment of President George W. Bush has grown organically from the very fabric of the universe. It's not that Democrats are motivated by frustration with Bush and his party's electoral winning streak--hell, the Dems profoundly regret that they've been brought to this! It's that Bush's lies and violations of the Constitution are so egregious, so without precedent in American history, that we must activate the gravest of constitutional mechanisms.

To wit: In his 286-page report The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, House Judiciary Committee member John Conyers (D-Mich.) isn't grinding any party ax. Rather, the problem is that "we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President, and other high-ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq."

As a result, "the House should create a bipartisan select committee vested with subpoena authority to investigate the Administration's abuses" in order "to protect our constitutional form of government."

Interestingly, Conyers, who entered the House of Representatives in 1964, never managed to find any impeachable behavior in the conduct of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who lied America into a far more destructive war and presided over the colossal civil rights violations of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. But it's not just elected Democrats who view impeachment as something that should happen only to the GOP.

Former Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham, whose most recent cancer on the national attention span was a 5,000-word "Case for Impeachment" in the magazine's March issue, told a Harper's roundtable: "The media tends to believe that the branches of government are the Democratic and Republican parties.... I think we also have to make it clear--if this turns into a partisan thing, Democrat/Republican, I would think it would do more...