Republicans have grumbled about the performance of Congress and the White House for the last two years and have threatened to stay home for the mid-terms to deliver a statement about their dissatisfaction. They argue that only a loss of power in Congress will get recalcitrant GOP politicians to listen to their complaints. However, such a move could have far-reaching consequences, as Byron York notes in today's National Review column:

There’s a word you won’t find in the text of Democratic Rep. John Conyers’s new “investigative report” on the Bush administration, “The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance.” And the word is…impeachment. Yet the 350-page “Constitution in Crisis,” released last week, is, more than anything else, a detailed road map for the impeachment of George W. Bush, ready for use should Democrats win control of the House of Representatives this November. And Conyers, who would become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — the panel that would initiate any impeachment proceedings — is the man who could make it happen.

While it’s absent in the body of the report, the I-word does appear a few times in Conyers’s 1,401 footnotes, which include citations of authorities ranging from the left-wing conspiracy website rawstory.com to the left-wing antiwar sites democracyrising.us and afterdowningstreet.org to the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian to the left-wing magazines The Nation and Mother Jones to the left-wing blogosphere favorite Murray Waas to the New York Times columnists Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich to former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh. (Sources for “The Constitution in Crisis” even include one story co-written by the disgraced Internet writer Jason Leopold.) Relying on such material, Conyers has created what might be called the definitive left-wing blogger’s history of the Bush administration. “I would like to thank the ‘blogosphere’ for its myriad and invaluable contributions to me and my staff,” Conyers writes in the report’s introduction. “Absent the assistance of ‘blogs’ and other Internet-based media, it would have been impossible to assemble all of the information, sources and other materials necessary to the preparation of this report.”

One might think that anything based on Jason Leopold and Joe Wilson has doomed itself to failure, but if Conyers takes control of the House Judiciary Committee, this is exactly what we will get. Nancy Pelosi has soft-pedaled this since Conyers first threatened impeachment, knowing that it will rally Republicans to the polls, but Conyers has not abandoned his conspiracy-theory project. Read all of York's column to see just how far down the rabbit hole Conyers has gone, and how far he plans to take the rest of us.

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