Impeachment buzz.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

Why is it that Republicans, somberly intoning about the "rule of law," could muster the political will to impeach a President over a semen-stained dress, but impeachment based on misleading the country into war and illegal wiretapping is beyond the pale?

Were Clinton's lies about his affair with a White House intern of graver national significance? Were the legal grounds for impeachment more solid? Of course not.

But the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that the Bush Administration is impervious to an impeachment drive. Americans, stunned and frightened into submission after 9/11, have been willing to accept civil liberties infringements in the Patriot Act in exchange for a greater sense of security. The transparently fabricated connection between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion sold, too. And Democrats don't want to look like wing nuts or conspiracy theorists or "soft on terror," so no one has been willing to draft articles of impeachment.

But the political atmosphere is changing. Senator Russ Feingold, who was the lone opponent of the Patriot Act in the Senate, managed to bring along enough colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stymie reenactment of the law at the end of December. Republicans have begun to criticize the Iraq War and to part ways with the Administration on other issues, including the torturing of detainees and the stomping of Americans' civil liberties.

The case for impeaching President Bush has grown more compelling over the last year, as evidence emerged that the President lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, systematically disregarded laws protecting human rights abroad and civil rights at home in the name of the "war on terror," and, most recently, is conducting a secret, illegal wiretapping program that targets American citizens.

And now there also seems to be a groundswell of political interest in holding the President accountable. House Democrats John Cowers and John Lewis and Senator Barbara Boxer all raised the possibility of impeachment as Congress adjourned in December. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the lead, drafting three bills: HR635, to set up a select committee to investigate the Administration's intelligence manipulation, support for torture, and retaliation against critics, and HR636 and HR637 to censure Bush and Cheney for blocking access to information on these acts.

Conyers's bills spring from a report, released by the Judiciary Committee's...