Gerald Ford famously remarked that an impeachable offense is “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” But even so relativistic a body as the current Republican-led House should be able to see that this president, this administration, meets any standard for impeachment from any moment in history. They’re criminals. They’re scum. They should be in jail. The president and vice president should be impeached first and then jailed. They should be crushed so thoroughly that no one will ever again attempt to cheat and cheapen this country as they have done.

It’s unlikely that the president conceived the idea of inaugurating widespread illegal eavesdropping all on his own. He’s not that detail oriented. But there’s obviously no doubt at all that he embraced the idea, or that the notion is as deeply agreeable to him as is being The War President. Leading the troops into battle, surveilling the world to keep America safe … it’s tailor-made for a messianic bobblehead, and one can tell from his response to the revelation that he’s pretty heavily invested in the operation.

Many people are asking why the administration chose to break the law in an arena where following it has been made very easy. The secret court administering government activities undertaken in compliance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is extraordinarily obliging: according to the annual FISA reports filed by the Justice Department, the court received 18,749 requests for authorization of physical searches, electronic surveillance or some combination of the two between January of 1979, when the law took effect, and December 31 of 2004, the end of the most recent reporting period (the 2005 report will be available in March or April of next year). Of those, the court has rejected a total of four requests, or roughly .o2%; in at least one instance, the court actually authorized activities the government hadn’t requested.

The Patriot Act made obtaining the FISA court’s approval even easier than it had been. And at the time Bush issued his illegal order authorizing the National Security Agency to break the law, none of the government’s applications for wiretaps or searches had been rejected: the four which were tossed were filed in 2003. In 2002, the administration successfully appealed court modifications to two requests, and in 2001, four applications were approved with modifications.

One has to wonder what was in those four applications that were denied, and in several others that were withdrawn from consideration before the court could rule on them. Regardless, the four slaps in the Bush administration’s collective face amounted to about .07% of the more than 5,600 applications submitted between 2001-2004; not a bad success rate although not, apparently, good enough to satisfy this collection of steroidal scofflaws. But why?

Three possible explanations come to mind, singly or in combination. One is that the surveillance is on a scale that makes applying for court approval impractical. The largest number of applications received by the court in any calendar year to date was last year’s 1,758. It’s quite possible that obtaining permission for the surveillance in question would have swamped the court, which has 11 judges and a 3-judge review panel to handle appeals from the government. Judging from Senator Jay Rockefeller’s letter to Dick Cheney, the president may well have authorized a data mining operation aimed at US citizens. The data mining operation known as Able Danger, which may or may not have dug up Mohammed Atta’s and other hijackers’ names prior to 911, generated 2.5 terabytes of data including “thousands” of names of US citizens; one that explicitly targets US citizens could be expected to generate a great many more names.

This is not to imply that the administration would have acted out of consideration for the court, but to say that an avalanche of applications numbering in the thousands would set off terminal alarms even in the FISA court, which was apparently already somewhat ill at ease with administration requests and, judging from the reports, growing more so.

The second is that the administration are allergic to oversight of even the mildest sort. Although none of last year’s applications were rejected, three were withdrawn before the court could render a decision and 94 were “substantively modified” by the court. 2003, of course, saw the four applications rejected and another 79 modified (from a total of 1,727); those two years produced by far the highest percentage of court-modified orders of any years since the Act took effect and, as noted above, the only instances in which applications were actually rejected. Given the general acceptance of the broad powers claimed by the administration in a variety of areas, along with the more relaxed FISA requirements established by the Patriot Act, the figures suggest that the administration have been overreaching fairly dramatically; it’s not surprising they’d try to find a way around what must have looked like the roadblock thrown up by the court, even though it was more like a wave of the green flag.

The third is that the administration is a collection of thugs who are using the NSA’s eavesdropping capacity for political purposes, spying on people no court in the universe would sanction as targets. Bush hired two people, retired Admiral John Poindexter and Elliott Abrams, who were convicted of crimes committed in service to Iran-Contra. Poindexter — who was hired by Bush to run the Pentagon’s data mining research — skated on a half-dozen felony convictions because an appellate court found that the prosecutor’s case was tainted by Poindexter’s immunized confessions to Congress, and Abrams was pardoned by Bush père after being convicted of lying to Congress. John Negroponte, our current “intelligence czar,” was the Reagan-era official in charge of covering up Salvadoran death squad atrocities during his tenure as Ambassador to Honduras.

John Bolton, serving as assistant Attorney General for congressional affairs, refused to comply with Congressional requests for justice department documents relating to Iran-Contra and argued that the president had the authority to terminate investigations by independent counsels, or to fire them if they refused to drop an investigation. That, of course, is the position taken by Richard Nixon, which led to the “Saturday Night Massacre” and, eventually, to the creation of the independent counsel statute.

In other words, the administration is populated by creatures who believe that the law does not apply to them, and who have practical experience in breaking the law and getting away with it to varying degrees. They get high on breaking the law, although no doubt for medicinal purposes only. It’s gratifying. It reinforces their sense of superiority or, in the president’s case, fills the void hollowed out by his inadequacies. At the risk of emulating Bill Frist and his vaunted Karnak-like diagnostic skills, I think it’s fair to say that these people behave like sociopaths.

Meanwhile, at the same time as they lug the Constitution ever closer to defenestration, they’re still sending soldiers into harm’s way with inadequate defenses. If this doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have one.

UPDATE: edited for clarity, plus the Democrats on the House judiciary committee have just released a lengthy report on Bush’s lies and lawbreaking at CensureBush. org. As the name implies, Congressman John Conyers wants a vote to censure Bush for what we already know he’s done, and a vote to establish a select committee to examine other potential crimes and look into impeachment proceedings. Stop by the site and lend them whatever support you can offer.

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