Patrick Buchanan recently called for the impeachment of George Bush over the issue of immigration.

Now, I don’t think Buchanan really thinks this is going to happen–though I still think he’s shown tremendous leadership on this issue.

However, let’s look a bit more carefully at the arithmetic of impeachment. It would require 218 congressmen to vote for impeachment to get the Senate involved. At present there are 202 Democrats in the Congress–90% of them would be hard pressed to not vote for Bush’s impeachment–which could include both charges around failure to support immigration law and charged related to the Downing Street Memo.

There are 85 members of the Immigration Reform Caucus (all but a few are Republicans). There are several Republican congressman like Dennis Hastert who have strongly opposed expansion of immigration but are not members of Tancredo’s Immigration Reform caucus.

If most of these folks would support impeachment (and stop just supporting major donors like they did with CAFTA and the Singapore Chile Free trade act), it could happen.

The Senate would be much harder. The Senate vote would require a tw0-thirds majority. Still, there it would take just 22 Republican Senators–the folks with B+ or above ratings from Americans for Better Immigration) to convict George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Conviction of both–without appointment of a new vice president–would be necessary to get Dennis Hastert in the White House

I would suggest again this is the only realistic way to get an immigration reformer in the White House. The immigration crisis has been created by wealthy interests for whom a loose immigration policy is virtually a license to print money.

Though Tancredo might make a heroic run for the White House, the current betting indicates he has a very slim chance of actually winning-and no one else with a similar record is showing up on the charts at all.

I think this immigration crisis will be seen by future generations as far worse than most of us even at VDARE.COM have been willing to contemplate.

Those concerned about immigration need to stop acting like this is some kind of minor problem we have lots of time to address-which is how the Immigration Reform Caucus has been acting. Returning the US to a high wage, high productivity economy is going to be difficult. Repatriating even a large portion of over ten million people without creating lasting hatred of the US in Latin America is going to be difficult. I’m not sure if Dennis Hastert is up to this difficult job.

We must start addressing immigration using what resources are available-and as soon as possible. I seriously doubt President Hastert would fail to enforce immigration law violations by US employers. At minimum, as the new head of the centrally-controlled GOP, Hastert would have a chance to seriously contain the influence of wealthy donors.

If Hastert isn’t really up to the task, in 3 years we’ll have a chance to elect someone else-after some of the more obvious solutions to the immigration crisis have been tried.

Reading John Brimelow’s recent post “Mexico: Do We Want to Import This?” reminded me of a funny story one of my students told me.

Maria had returned to Mexico for Christmas to visit her elderly parents. While driving to their house, a “policeman” signaled for her to pull over for speeding.

When Maria protested that she had been driving well under the speed limit, the “policeman” said, “Look, we can take care of this here or I can write you a ticket and you’ll have to spend all day in court dealing with it.”

Since Maria had been through this drill before, she handed him $20 and drove off.

A few kilometers down the road, another “policeman” stopped her for the same reason. “But I just paid an officer less than ten minutes ago,” Maria told him.

“Yes,” he replied, “but that was in Zone 10. Now you are in Zone 11.”