Impeachment buzz.

Why is it that Republicans, somberly intoning about the "rule of law," could muster the political will to impeach a President over a semen-stained dress, but impeachment based on misleading the country into war and illegal wiretapping is beyond the pale?

Were Clinton's lies about his affair with a White House intern of graver national significance? Were the legal grounds for impeachment more solid? Of course not.

But the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that the Bush Administration is impervious to an impeachment drive. Americans, stunned and frightened into submission after 9/11, have been willing to accept civil liberties infringements in the Patriot Act in exchange for a greater sense of security. The transparently fabricated connection between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion sold, too. And Democrats don't want to look like wing nuts or conspiracy theorists or "soft on terror," so no one has been willing to draft articles of impeachment.

But the political atmosphere is changing. Senator Russ Feingold, who was the lone opponent of the Patriot Act in the Senate, managed to bring along enough colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stymie reenactment of the law at the end of December. Republicans have begun to criticize the Iraq War and to part ways with the Administration on other issues, including the torturing of detainees and the stomping of Americans' civil liberties.

The case for impeaching President Bush has grown more compelling over the last year, as evidence emerged that the President lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, systematically disregarded laws protecting human rights abroad and civil rights at home in the name of the "war on terror," and, most recently, is conducting a secret, illegal wiretapping program that targets American citizens.

And now there also seems to be a groundswell of political interest in holding the President accountable. House Democrats John Cowers and John Lewis and Senator Barbara Boxer all raised the possibility of impeachment as Congress adjourned in December. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the lead, drafting three bills: HR635, to set up a select committee to investigate the Administration's intelligence manipulation, support for torture, and retaliation against critics, and HR636 and HR637 to censure Bush and Cheney for blocking access to information on these acts.

Conyers's bills spring from a report, released by the Judiciary Committee's Democratic staff, entitled "The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War."

Last May, the foreign press, progressive activists, and the leftwing media inside the United States shouted themselves hoarse over what they considered the smoking gun in Bush's Iraq War deception--the Downing Street Memo. (That was the leaked report in which Britain's head of foreign intelligence summarized a meeting in Washington during the lead-up to the war, saying, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.")

It took months before the Downing Street Memo began to receive serious coverage in the mainstream media. But a group called After Downing Street (www.afterdowningstreet.org) helped launch Cindy Sheehan's crusade against Bush's war. And activists like Tim Carpenter, director of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and John Bonifaz, author of a book on impeaching Bush and now a candidate for secretary of state of Massachusetts, continued to beat the drum for impeachment. Bonifaz began talking with John Conyers's office last summer about drafting articles of impeachment.

The Administration's actions "clearly rise to the level of impeachable conduct," Conyers writes on his website. "However, because the Administration has failed to respond to requests for information about these charges, it is not yet possible to conclude that an impeachment inquiry or articles of impeachment are warranted." Instead, Conyers wants to establish an investigative committee that will refer impeachable evidence to the Judiciary Committee.

Among the grassroots supporters of Conyers's efforts, there are those who would like to go further. "We support Conyers's effort, but we really want articles of impeachment introduced now," says Bob Fertik, president of ImpeachPAC, a political action committee dedicated to supporting Congressional candidates who favor impeaching Bush. "We really think there is sufficient grounds. Impeachment is the equivalent of indictment. The standard of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt, it is probable cause. There is probable cause Bush lied about Iraq simply based on the Downing Street Memo."

ImpeachPAC (www.ImpeachPAC.org) has so far raised about $40,000 from 1,000 grassroots donors. Tony Trupiano from Michigan is the PAC's first recipient of funds. The PAC gave him $2,500, and helped him raise another $6,000 directly from supporters.

Fertik launched the PAC on November 4. He took heart from a Zogby poll that AfterDowningStreet.org commissioned, which found 53 percent of Americans thought Bush ought to be impeached if he lied about Iraq.

"So a solid majority of Americans support impeachment," Fertik says. "The problem we face is there are not members of Congress willing to introduce articles."

Another problem is that members of Congress and the press remain convinced that impeachment is a dead end. With Republican majorities in both houses, it is highly unlikely that even a fearless Democratic impeachment drive could garner the votes to succeed.

But "there are other reasons to do this," says Tim Carpenter of PDA, who helped organize a series of town meetings to drum up grassroots support for impeachment around the nation on January 7. "This is only the first bell. This is going to reverberate."

And then there are the Congressional elections in the fall: "We are working to be a majority after the next election cycle," says Carpenter.

Like the Conyers report on election shenanigans in Ohio, "The Constitution in Crisis" makes compelling reading. But will more people listen this time?

Bonifaz, who made editorial suggestions on both reports, thinks so.

"The climate has changed dramatically since the report on Ohio," he says. "The majority of people recognize the war was a mistake, and the President may have lied about the basis for the war."

Indictments have dogged the Administration lately, from Scooter Libby's to Tom DeLay's to Jack Abramoff's. And the revelations about the President authorizing illegal spying on Americans by the NSA may spur more calls for the biggest indictment of them all.

"This is an Administration that shows utter contempt for the rule of law and that needs to be reined in," says Bonifaz. "And more and more people are recognizing that."

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.