Reply #66: This is exactly why [View All]

[jmowreader]

All it would do is encourage him.

How it works:

Impeachment is a fairly simple affair. You need a heinous crime committed by a government official, a simple majority in the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority in the Senate, and whoever you've got the ass at this week goes home.

We can come up with the heinous crime fairly easily. The man commits a lot of impeachable offenses, so getting a crime isn't all that hard.

Now that we ostensibly have a Democratic majority in the House (although you can't tell by looking at them), pulling out a 50-percent-plus-one vote to refer to the Senate is no barrier, assuming all the Democrats and a handful of Republicans (the ones from liberal districts who'd like to get reelected) vote against Shrub.

The Senate requires, at the 100-senator level, about 67 votes to convict if you want to get rid of him. Or, conversely, you need 34 votes to acquit if you want to keep him. There is a very high probability that 34-35 Republicans would stand by Bush.

So let's say we ran impeachment into the Senate on some fairly substantial charges--ones that would send most dictators before a firing squad. If they come up with 35 votes to acquit, he'll think he won major approval of all he has done, and he'll get worse. I think that if Bush were to keep his office after an impeachment, he'd either nuke Iran or send a few Democratic senators some care packages.

OTOH, it WOULD have been nice if they would have at least made a little more strenuous of an objection to John Roberts and Samual Alito.