historically, there have been three impeachable offense constructions:
loose: incompetent or politically objectionable officers,
strict: only impeachable offenses are those that break criminal laws
moderate: more or less prevailing view, impeachable offenses need not be criminal but have to reflect serious dereliction of duty, substantial violation of constitutional/legal responsibilities, sustained failure to meet one's obligation,
The original spirit of impeachment was to address a matter of principle, especially an injury to the nation, rather than trouble with "legal niceties."... Yoshie
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There doesn't seem to be any problem meeting any one or all of these very diverse criterion. For the strict case, ordering unrestricted NSA domestic surveillance without warrants and without judicial oversight of any sort is against the law, period. Lying to Congress and the public on the need wage war on Iraq seems to qualify under a loose interpretation as well as the original `spirt of impeachment'. And these are just the well documented and openly admitted high crimes.
With a more penetrating investigation and some forceful and realistic probing into the blatant chicanery going on with private contractors, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the legal counsel in the White House you could probably make a very strong case for war crimes in treatment of prisoners and the whole gulag system from Guatanamo, Camp X-Ray, and Abu Ghraib.
As for Cheney, a similar heavy handed probe into Halliburton and the Pentagon, along with probes into Delay, Abramoff, Enron, and the massive public utility frauds that took place in the first term would likely make Cheney impeachable on fraud, collusion, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. After all Cheney, Spencer Abraham, and Ken Lay met in the WH during the so-called energy crisis in spring 2001---and Cheney refused to release notes on those meeting, citing executive privilege...
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert could probably be taken down on money laundering, fraud, violation of various state election laws, just like DeLay---if they squeeze Abramoff hard enough.
Who's next in line. I forget now. President pro tem of the Senate. Is that the same as majority leader? No. Frisk is already under investigation... Hmm
Where exactly do we find somebody who isn't already either suspected of high crimes and misdemeanors, under indictment or under investigation for fraud, corruption, bribery, kick-backs, and money laundering? As far as I can tell the whole line of succession is involved in some form or other of criminal racketeering.
Of course how likely is that half of these goons will put the other half on trial?
CG