Bill Moyers had a 50 minute discussion of impeachment by John Nichols (of the Nation) and Bruce Fein (a legal Reaganaut who drew up one of the articles of impeachment against Clinton) that was surprisingly engaging and entertaining IMHO. I highly recommend it. It'll be rebroadcast in NY on Sunday at 7pm and probably at a similar time in other places. It's not yet on YouTube in its entirety, but probably it will be in a couple days.
They've got a lot of different points. But just in passing, their main response to the argument that "they'll be out 18 months, and replaced by a bourgeois tool" is: you don't want the next bourgeois tool, and every one thereafter, to have these new powers. And that they will unless impeachment hearings are begun. And that the hearings will have the power (by themselves, *even without conviction*) to remove precedent from these engorgements of presidential power. Which, they convincingly argue, are beyond anything any president in history has claimed. And they also argue that if these precedents are left, we can be almost certain they will be used.
Even if you don't buy it, the two of them make a very interesting pair. Perhaps what's most compelling is that they keep it up for an hour without sounding the slightest bit breathless or air-headed. Their model for impeachment is Nixon, not Clinton; they think starting impeachment hearings in this case would return to the procedure to the gravitas it deserves rather than render it even more trivial. That might be naive. But, like I said, I personally found their various points very interesting to listen to and consider.
Michael