Impeachment Tit-for-Tat

Here comes John Conyers:

In any event, that kind of definitive, no-impeachment rhetoric is not coming from John Conyers. Instead, Conyers has spent the last several years carefully assembling a case for removing the president. His most recent effort was a 350-page report, released in August, entitled, “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance.” The report never mentioned the word “impeachment,” but Conyers made it clear that he believes the president has committed several impeachable offenses.

“Approximately 26 laws and regulations may have been violated by this administration’s misconduct,” Conyers wrote on the DailyKos and Huffington Post websites the day the report was released. “The report…compiles the accumulated evidence that the Bush administration has thumbed its nose at our nation’s laws, and the Constitution itself.”

Conyers’s accusations were quite specific. On the war in Iraq, for example, he accused Bush of violating four laws: Committing a Fraud Against the United States (18 U.S.C. 371); Making False Statements to Congress (18 U.S.C. 1001); War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148); and Misuse of Government Funds (31 U.S.C. 1301).

The fraud committed by the president, Conyers argued, was making the decision to go to war in Iraq before asking Congress for the authority to do so. (The reason for that, Conyers says, was that the president was “avenging [his] father and working with the neo-cons.”) The false statements, according to Conyers, include the president’s mention, in the 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Africa. And the violations of the War Powers Resolution and Misuse of Government Funds came when the president moved some military assets to the Gulf region before Congress voted to authorize the war.

Conyers also alleged that the president has broken three other laws, Anti-Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. 2340-40A), The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441), and Material Witness (18 U.S.C. 3144), with his policies on the treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror. And then, Conyers alleged that the president broke four more laws, Obstructing Congress (18 U.S.C. 1505), Whistleblower Protection (5 U.S.C. 2302), The Lloyd-LaFollette Act (5 U.S.C. 7211), Retaliating against Witnesses (18 U.S.C. 1513), in the Valerie Plame/CIA leak affair. Finally, Conyers alleged the president broke five more laws, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.), National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. chapter 15), Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 222), Stored Communications Act of 1986 (18 U.S.C. 2702), and Pen Registers or Trap and Trace Devices (18 U.S.C. 3121), in the NSA warrantless-wiretap matter.

Reading the report, it seems safe to say that Conyers is not doing all that work on a lark; he quite seriously believes George W. Bush has broken a slew of laws. And any one of Conyers’ specific accusations might serve as the basis for an impeachment resolution. In fact, rather than ask whether Conyers might move to impeach the president if Democrats win in November, it seems more reasonable to ask how Conyers could not move to impeach the president, given the long bill of particulars he has compiled.

If the Dems do win both houses of Congress, George W. Bush will be impeached within the year. The Democrats simply will not control themselves.