Impeachment is about upholding the Constitution

It's time to impeach Bush, Cheney and the public knows it

JOHN NICHOLS, GUEST COLUMNIST, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Recently the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS devoted a full hour to the subject of impeaching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- the first such attention by a national network.

The remarkable thing about the response was not its size or intensity. After visiting more than a dozen states to address the issue, I have come to understand the depth of the public's desire for accountability.

But it was only after Moyers invited conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein and me to lay out not merely the specific grounds for impeachment but the historical rationale for applying the "heroic medicine" -- the Founders' preferred cure for a constitutional crisis -- that I fully understood the extent to which Americans recognize that this is about a lot more than the high crimes and misdemeanors of a regal president and his monarchical vice president.

The stakes are enormous: If Bush and Cheney are not held accountable, this administration will hand off to its successors a toolbox of powers greater than any executive has ever held -- more authority, concentrated in fewer hands, than the Founders could have conceived or would have allowed.

(The rest is here.)