Late last year, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell and Post polling director Richard Morin were involved in a flap over the Post’s refusal to conduct a poll measuring public support for the impeachment of president Bush.

Morin made conflicting and less than convincing arguments for his reluctance to conduct the poll. He said first that such a question was inherently biased, and then that “it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion.”

The first argument is patently stupid: by that standard, any question which could result in negative results for the president — and almost all of them do these days — is biased. If Morin really believed it, he’d have to find another job. The second might have had some merit three years ago, but times have changed. Bush’s approval ratings have tanked, and the majority of Americans think he lied about Iraq and is generally incompetent and untrustworthy.

By Morin’s standards, that’s not enough. He wants “considered discussion” or the introduction of articles of impeachment before he’ll pop the question. No one has sponsored the latter — although it’s probably safe to assume someone has written them up — but we passed the considered discussion threshold some time ago, and in Morin’s own paper.

On October 28 of 2004, Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote, under the headline “Hold Bush Accountable,” the following:

I do not write the headlines for my columns. Someone else does. But if I were to write the headline for this one, it would be “Impeach George Bush.”

And he follows with what seems to be a considered argument for impeachment. Granted, Cohen is regarded by most liberal bloggers as the Post’s überwanker, but that should only bolster his credentials in Morin’s eyes.

On July 6 of 2005, Post online columnist Dan Froomkin uttered the I-word in the context of a Zogby poll showing that 42% of Americans supported impeachment if Bush were shown to have lied about the threat posed by Iraq. Here’s Froomkin:

More than four in 10 Americans, according to a recent Zogby poll, say that if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment.

But you wouldn’t know it from following the news. Only three mainstream outlets that I can find made even cursory mention of the poll last week when it came out.

You also wouldn’t know it judging from the political discourse in Washington, but that makes a little more sense. After all, impeachment is for all practical purposes a political act, not a legal one. So with a Republican-controlled Congress that doesn’t even like to perform basic White House oversight, it’s basically a moot point.

Nevertheless, could there be anything that 42 percent of Americans agree on that the media care about so little?

Since then, two other Zogby polls and an Ipsos poll show that a majority of Americans now support impeachment if Bush lied about Iraq. And even larger majorities believe he did lie about Iraq.

Froomkin returned to the question in December of 2005, noting that AP, Knight Ridder and other institutional press outlets were looking at the issue.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) sent a letter on Monday to four unidentified presidential scholars, asking them whether they think Bush’s authorization of warrantless domestic spying amounted to an impeachable offense.

Boxer wrote that her interest was sparked after former Nixon White House counsel John Dean said the surveillance order was an impeachable offence.

“I take very seriously Mr. Dean’s comments, as I view him to be an expert on presidential abuse of power. I am expecting a full airing of this matter by the Senate in the very near future,” she wrote.

Todd Gillman writes in the Dallas Morning News: “Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., suggested that Mr. Bush’s actions could justify impeachment. The longtime civil rights leader said the spying program evokes ‘the dark past when our government spied on civil rights leaders and Vietnam War protesters,’ adding that he believed Mr. Bush violated the law. ‘There is no question that the U.S. Congress has impeached presidents for lesser offenses,’ he said.”

Ron Hutcheson writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers that “some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.

Hutcheson is Knight Ridder’s White House correspondent, and a former chief of the White House Correspondents Association.

Post staff writer Shailagh Murray covered the initial Zogby poll in a July 3, 2005 story, including a quote from Zogby — “[The 42% in favor of impeachment] was much higher than I expected” — and pointing out that “in October 1998, as the House moved to impeach President Bill Clinton over the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, a Zogby poll found that 39 percent of voters supported the House action, while 56 percent opposed it.” And as Media Matters noted, the Post was polling on impeachment as soon as the Lewinsky scandal broke.

Today, Post columnist Harold Myerson addresses the issue — he thinks Bush is dangerous and malevolent but that impeachment is at least premature — and the Post carries an Associated Press story about resolutions in several Vermont towns asking Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders to introduce articles of impeachment.

While rejecting the notion of impeachment, Myerson adds some detail about the range of people supporting the idea, including his mother.

It’s all over the blogosphere. It’s the cover story in the current Harper’s. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has passed an impeachment resolution. Antiwar activists, civil libertarians, all the usual-suspect constituencies have growing impeachment tendencies. But it’s reaching beyond the usual suspects, as I discovered last month when I appeared on a media panel before the national legislative conference of a major union. Local activists from across the nation spent an hour asking us questions, and one out of every three queries, it seemed to me, boiled down to, “How can we impeach this guy?”

So we have several members of Congress, a number of lawyers and constitutional scholars, ordinary citizens in Vermont, union members and various Washington Post writers either supporting impeachment or writing about the support for it. We have four polls — three from Zogby and one from Ipsos — showing that conditional support for impeachment among the public has grown from a substantial minority in July of last year to a majority in January of this year.

Doesn’t all that add up to a considered discussion of impeachment? If you think so, drop a polite note to Richard Morin at the Post, or use his feedback form to request a Post poll on the subject.

UPDATE: A reader reminds me that Congressman John Conyers has introduced measures to censure Bush and Cheney and to establish a committee to investigate whether Bush has committed impeachable offenses.

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