Conyers Hones A Case Against President Bush

WASHINGTON — The Democratic leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is promising that her party has no plans to pursue impeachment of President Bush if it wins a majority in next month's elections. But she intends to allow the House Judiciary Committee to be headed by a lawmaker who has been preparing the grounds for impeachment for two years.

John Conyers, a Democrat of Michigan, is now in line to become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has the authority to begin hearings and an investigation into whether the planning and selling of the Iraq war was a constitutional crime. Last week, the Washington Post first reported that if Ms. Pelosi, a Democrat of California, becomes House majority leader, she will keep the seniority system intact for selecting committee chairmen in Congress. An aide to Ms. Pelosi confirmed the report yesterday.

Mr. Conyers's office has released two reports in the last year outlining Mr. Bush's various constitutional transgressions in the war on terror. The first report, released in 2005, focused mostly on his handling of pre-war Iraq intelligence. The second, released this year, was dedicated to the Bush administration's violations of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act in authorizing the National Security Agency to listen in to some domestic phone calls without a court warrant.

Ten months ago, Mr. Conyers introduced legislation to form a "select committee to investigate the administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment."

Members of Mr. Conyers's staff refused a request to answer questions on the record yesterday. A senior aide to Mr. Conyers was careful to say that his boss "has no plans to begin impeachment proceedings." But the aide added, "If evidence for impeachment is uncovered, it should be brought before the committee."

Instead, the aide pointed this reporter to a May 17 opinion piece Mr. Conyers wrote for the Washington Post, "No Rush to Impeachment." In it, Mr. Conyers writes that if Democrats win the House, he would not commence impeachment proceedings.

He does, however, point to his proposal for a bipartisan panel to investigate a series of charges ranging from pre-war intelligence manipulation to the intimidation of internal policy critics. "At the end of the process, if — and only if — the select committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, finds evidence of potentially impeachable offenses, it would forward that information to the Judiciary Committee," he writes.

But it is the beginning of this discovery process that has caused some worry for Ms. Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership. Last spring, Ms. Pelosi personally appealed with more liberal Democrats to end their support for the Conyers resolution. Today, that resolution has only 37 co-sponsors.

A staffer for the minority leader said yesterday that he expected oversight regarding the war, and particularly prewar intelligence, to be handled out by the House Government Oversight Committee. But this staffer conceded, "There are jurisdictional issues that need to be worked out if we win a majority."

Ms. Pelosi, speaking on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, pledged that impeachment was "off the table." Of Mr. Bush and Vice President Cheney, she said: "This election is about them. This is a referendum on them. Making them lame ducks is good enough for me."

But Ms. Pelosi's allergy to impeachment has some of the grassroots activists in the Democratic Party already pining for recalcitrance from Mr. Conyers.

David Swanson, the Washington director of a political action committee that raises money for pro-impeachment candidates, ImpeachPAC, said he was disappointed in Ms. Pelosi.

"I think it is not the place of the broadcast media to demand that our elected officials take positions against protecting our Constitution," Mr. Swanson said. "It is not the place of Congresswoman Pelosi to claim to know where investigations might lead when overwhelming evidence of impeachable offenses is already public knowledge.

But I would encourage people around the country not to lose heart and to understand that a popular movement will be able to persuade chairman Conyers and members of the House Judiciary Committee to move forward, regardless of what Congresswoman Pelosi says on television."

Mr. Swanson added that his committee is endorsing 13 Democratic challengers this political season, but no House incumbents."We set the bar very high," he said. "In order to get our endorsement, you have to support actual calls for impeachment, not just the Conyers resolution."