IMPEACHMENT TALK

Advocates of impeaching George Bush may have been pleased last December when the conservative newspaper Barron’s, a sister publication of The Wall Street Journal, started discussing it too. Now, they may feel otherwise.

Outside groups had long been campaigning for impeachment, mainly on the Internet. The mainstream media and congressional leaders had paid little or no attention. Barron’s editorial page editor, Thomas Donlan, broke the ice on Christmas Eve, writing that Mr. Bush had committed a “potentially impeachable offense” by his “willful disregard of a law” when he ordered warrantless wiretapping.

He did suggest a way out: “either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.” Republican senators have now agreed to a compromise. Plans for a full inquiry would be dropped, and the administration would accept the authority of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and some degree of congressional oversight.

Remaining accusations on the list of allegedly impeachable offenses are the president’s decision to invade Iraq and his administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists, permitting what amounts to torture.

Ramsey Clark, U.S. attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, has set up a Web site, VoteToImpeach.org, listing 10 of Mr. Bush’s “alleged impeachable acts,” winding up with “Making, ordering and condoning false statements and propaganda and concealing information vital to public discussion and informed judgment to create a climate of fear and hatred and destroy opposition to his war goals.”

Advocates of impeachment often contrast these allegations with the less serious charges of obstruction of justice that led Richard M. Nixon to resign and Bill Clinton’s lies about his sexual affairs. As a practical matter, impeachment of George W. Bush is a political impossibility, since his party controls the House of Representatives, which would have to vote on the charges.

Beyond that, advocates of impeachment could not help but notice this week Democratic Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold’s proposal to censure the president was a gift to the president’s base, which now has a new reason to rally around him. As Howard Kurtz wrote recently in The Washington Post, “Feingold’s own party wishes the thing would just go away, while the other party would enjoy talking about it for days on end. …”

Still another obstacle to the impeachment campaign is that, if successful, it would make Vice President Dick Cheney president. (Ramsey Clark has an answer to that one. He wants to impeach Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as well as the president.) The base would be fully rallied by then.