The president has said that he’s doing this, and it’s a criminal charge that can get you five years in jail for each count. Additionally, it violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits unlawful searches and seizures — this includes electronic surveillance. On a deeper level, these wiretaps deny the efficacy and validity of a congressional act.

Article Two of the impeachment of Richard Nixon is very similar. Nixon went outside of Congressional law and engaged in warrantless wiretapping against domestic dissidents and others who opposed the war in Vietnam. So, this article has a historical relation, obviously solid.

Article II is the falsifications that were used to justify the Iraq war. That’s the article that congressman John Conyers has really focused on — he’s written an extensive report that documents this. You reference any particular day and the administration was making statements that Iraq has a relationship to 9/11, al Qaida and Osama bin Laden; that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In the one and a half years leading up to the war, the time during which they were making these statements, they knew that they were false.

Lying to Congress and the American people got us into a war that has two serious impeachable issues within it: First, it’s an aggressive war contrary to the UN charter and contrary to law that doesn’t allow war unless it’s in self-defense.

Secondly, it undermines the authority of Congress and the American people to decide when war is necessary. Through the lies, he got a number of Congress people to believe that war was necessary, thereby undercutting their constitutional obligation to decide on war.

Elizabeth Holtzman, who was part of the Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon, has written a long piece about how this constitutes fraud under criminal law. Of course, you don’t need a criminal act to impeach someone, you simply need an act that undermines and subverts the basic constitutional structure of our government, as well as a failure to execute the proper laws.

Article III deals with what the president has done in regard to the issues of torture, arbitrary long-term detentions, disappearances and special trial. Our law is very clear on these things. You can’t torture people, you can’t commit war crimes, you can’t send people to countries where they’re tortured and you can’t set up special courts for trial. The Geneva Conventions are a part of our law, as is the international covenant of civil and political rights. The president, in authorizing that entire range of activities, has not met with his constitutional obligation to faithfully execute laws.

Congress tried to put some brakes on the president through the McCain amendment, which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. But the president, in a signing statement, essentially said he reserved the right to ignore what Congress says. What he did is not just a violation of the law; he is destroying the checks and balances of our Constitution.

Article IV is a general article that puts all of the prior three articles together. If you look at these things together, you see that they are essentially destroying our republic and our democracy. They are destroying the constitutional structure of our government. Therefore, he should be impeached.

OR: Was it your intent for the book to be utilized by members of Congress to begin impeachment proceedings?

MR: Yes, that’s definitely one of our intents. We would also like to see some courage given to our members of Congress. John Conyers has begun the process with 26 people now signed onto the inquiry bill, but that’s very small compared to the number that should be there. Similarly with the NSA spying, 18 have signed on to a serious inquiry, but we’re talking about the same kinds of conduct that were part of Nixon’s impeachment proceedings — illegal use of electronic surveillance.

Even Democrats like Al Gore are calling this a government of tyranny because of the utter and complete subverting of the Constitution.

Another intent is to popularize the issue that what the president has done has got to be looked. These aren’t just individual issues, but a destruction of democracy on its deepest level. We want to popularize that idea and get it out there, particularly right now.

If you look at the polls on warrantless wiretapping and the Iraq War, over 50 percent of Americans think that Bush could be impeached for these activities. But the media aren’t picking this up. No one’s talking about impeachment from the New York Times, or the Washington Post or anywhere else.

OR: Why do you think that is?

MR:: They claim it’s because it’s not realistic. But that’s not at all the case. When they started with the Clinton impeachment, less than 30 percent of the people were willing to impeach him for his actions. Yet, the media carried it widely.

It may be that there’s a buy-in by some part of this media leader society — thinking that this could shake up our government too much. Some people think it’s too dangerous to do so, but we would argue that it’s much too dangerous not to.

OR: What do you say to Americans who think it isn’t worth bothering with impeachment with the president currently in his final term?

MR: This administration has gone so far beyond what the requirements of the Constitution and the law. The question is whether this country can ever come back and resemble a democracy again. Unless you hold accountable the people who actually carried out an illegal war with Iraq, warrantless wiretapping and torture, there’s nothing to stop the next administration — whether it’s Republican or Democrat — from continuing with the same.

We have to show that what happened in this country in the past four years is an utter subversion of our Constitution and completely unlawful under domestic and international law. Otherwise, I fear that this country may be changed forever in a very negative direction.

OR: What’s at stake here?

MR: What’s at stake is a presidency that is becoming an imperial presidency — in which he’s no longer responsible to the judiciary or the Congress. This is a president that thinks that, on his own, he can wiretap people, torture people, pick them up anywhere in the world. This has to be beaten back, and it has to be done soon. It is becoming embedded in our society in a way that is very hard to get rid of.

For instance, we just had a loss in the case of Maher Arar. Part of the judge’s thinking in his decision was that, while it may not be okay to torture in a criminal case, it may be okay if it’s to prevent terrorism. When that kind of thinking is afoot, something has to be done. Otherwise, it will become embedded in our legal and political thinking in the next generations. There has to be accountability for this.

OR:There’s a lot of people, especially on the left, who think of George W. Bush as very self-serving president. This characterization may be preventing people from seeing that he is actually thinking well beyond his presidency — with the intent to expand executive power for future administrations. Is this a fair characterization?

MR: Yes, this is about a particularly bad president — a president who doesn’t care about constitutional rights. But what’s really going on here is what Cheney actually came out and stated a month ago when he talked about warrantless wiretapping. He said that they wanted to overcome what happened to the presidency during the ’60s and the ’70s.

There’s an absolute intent here to make the presidency much more powerful, what they call a unitary presidency where they’re not just a co-equal branch, but they are the branch — no court or Congress can check them.

This is not just about the president any longer, it’s about these assertions of inherent power in the executive to override constitutional, international, congressional limitations, and judicial limitations. That’s a big problem because that’s essentially a dictatorship.

OR: With all this gratuitous conduct that has been amassed in the media, the question arises, why haven’t there been many legal successes stopping this behavior?

MR: At the CCR, in almost every single action discussed in the articles, we have various lawsuits going. The problem is that they take a long time. Also, the courts are not always in our favor. And, even when we win, the administration is able to undercut them. You don’t just win by lawsuits; you win by popular protest, people in the streets. That’s the way you have to win.

The Center really believes that our lawsuits are important and people have to be represented. We have to stop torture to the extent that we can. But there has to be popular protest in this country, or our lawsuits are not going to change anything.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an editorial fellow at AlterNet.