The process of impeachment is just like it is at the federal level: It requires a majority vote in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Democrat Brad Gallegos announced his candidacy for Block’s seat on the PRC, bringing the total number of announced Democratic challengers against Block to five.

At another town hall meeting Tuesday night, Burgess, a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, faced more impeachment questions from an unhappy crowd, which he declined to answer this time.

U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville

The controversy began for Burgess a NE Tarrant Tea Party meeting in Keller Monday night, where he faced tough questions over his support for the recently passed debt ceiling hike. One man told Burgess the congressman had “caved” over the debt ceiling, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. At another point, nearly everyone in the room raised their hands to show Burgess they disagreed with his vote.

And then this happened:

When one attendee suggested that the House push for impeachment proceedings against President Obama to obstruct the president from pushing his agenda, Burgess was receptive.

“It needs to happen, and I agree with you it would tie things up,” Burgess said. “No question about that.”

When asked about the comment later, Burgess said he wasn’t sure whether the proper charges to bring up articles of impeachment against Obama were there, but he didn’t rule out pursuing such a course.

The Star-Telegram followed that story with an editorial chastising Burgess for toying with the idea to keep the crowd happy. “Impeachment must never be allowed to become a political tool,” the newspaper wrote.

Burgess had no problem answering “no” when he was asked whether he would vote for another increase in the national debt limit. It could not have been hard for him to tell that “no” was what the crowd wanted to hear on that issue.

But he couldn’t seem to get his lips around the word “no” when asked about using impeachment of the president as the ultimate political tool.

Tuesday, Burgess clarified what he meant for Dallas Morning News, saying he was “was trying to honestly answer [the attendee’s] question.” Burgess told the Morning News he wasn’t really advocate for impeachment, and then wedged the door open a little further:

He added that there are more effective ways to tie up Obama’s agenda through House procedures.

However, Burgess said that had Obama exercised a provision of the 14th Amendment to unilaterally increase the debt ceiling, as some suggested the president do, impeachment proceedings were a possibility.

Burgess faced another unhappy crowd of constituents at Denton High School Tuesday night, which grilled him some more over the budget deal. According to a report in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Burgess got yet another impeachment question from the crowd, but wouldn’t bite this time:

Other questions touched on securing the borders, adhering closer to the Constitution, funding the wars, raising taxes, and comments Burgess made recently about impeaching President Obama as a way to tie up loose ends by procedural means. Amid more boos, Burgess skipped the questions and went on to address other comments made.

We haven’t seen the full poll results yet, but I’ve been shown an early list of the questions that Research 2000 cycled through. Some of the wording may have been changed since.

QUESTION: Should Barack Obama be impeached?
QUESTION: Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States?
QUESTION: Do you think Barack Obama shows too much deference to foreign leaders?
QUESTION: Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
QUESTION: Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?
QUESTION: Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama?
QUESTION: Do you believe your state should secede from the United States?
QUESTION: Should Congress make it easier for workers to form and join labor unions?
QUESTION: Would you support or oppose giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and learn English?
QUESTION: Should homosexuals be allowed to serve in the military?
QUESTION: Should homosexuals be allowed to marry?
QUESTION: Should homosexual couples receive any state or federal benefits?
QUESTION: Should homosexuals be allowed to teach in public schools?
QUESTION: Should sex education be taught in public schools?
QUESTION: Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?
QUESTION: Are marriages equal partnerships, or are men the leaders of their households?
QUESTION: Should contraceptive use be outlawed?
QUESTION: Do you believe the birth control pill is abortion?
QUESTION: Do you consider abortion to be murder?
QUESTION: Do you support the death penalty?
QUESTION: Should women work outside the home?
QUESTION: Do you believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is through Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith?

“I’m not clear exactly what ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ they are using to justify that position,” said PPP’s Tom Jensen, “but there may be a certain segment of voters on both the right and the left these days that simply think the President doing things they don’t agree with is grounds for removal from office.”

Without probing further it’s hard to say, but like the post-Iraq War opposition to George W. Bush, the first-year opposition to President Obama has included a lot of rhetoric about the president’s supposed violations of the Constitution. With Bush, it was war-related; with Obama, it’s Glenn Beck critiques like “where in the Constitution does the president have the right to take over a car company?”

Given the fact there aren’t enough votes for impeachment, if censure is the only available option, then that will be the option. It’s the only one that has a chance of surviving.

Shortly thereafter, Sanford voted to impeach Clinton on four counts.

“Three thousand of our fellow citizens had been killed in a deliberate attack by a foreign enemy,” said Yoo, according to The Los Angeles Times, unperturbed by shouts from the audience that he is a war criminal and should be in jail. “That forced us in the government to have to consider measures to gain information using presidential constitutional provisions to protect the country from further attack.”

“Was it worth it?” he asked. “We haven’t had an attack in more than seven years.”

Yoo’s confident defense of his controversial legal positions comes as the threat of prosecution for Yoo and his OLC colleagues intensifies. Yesterday, President Obama said that he would not interfere with an attempt to prosecute the lawyers who authorized interrogators’ abusive conduct, and he would be open to a full congressional investigation as well.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), who since proposing legislation in January has been calling for a broad-ranging investigation of Bush policies that would not rule out subsequent prosecutions — unlike Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) proposed “Commission of Inquiry” — reiterated his call for a thorough investigation. Conyers added that the House Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, would hold hearings of its own on the potentially illegal conduct of the Justice Department officials, such as Yoo.

A report on the investigation of the lawyers’ conduct from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to be released soon, though the Justice Department is still reviewing it. The OPR evaluation is reportedly very critical of the lawyers’ legal reasoning, and tracks the lawyers’ communications with the White House to determine what influenced their conclusions.

Conyers said yesterday that if the OPR report is delayed any further, “we will have hearings in the near term in any event. Critical questions remain concerning how these memos came into existence and were approved, which our committee is uniquely situated to consider.”

As I’ve noted before, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Leahy, is also well-suited to conduct such an inquiry into the Justice Department’s role in approving torture and other abuses derived from torture techniques used by North Korea, China and other foreign governments on captured soldiers, as detailed by the Senate Armed Services Committee report released Tuesday. So far, however, it has declined to do so.

No matter who investigates, John Yoo is unlikely to change his mind about the legality of using torture to extract information from terror suspects, as his confident demeanor at yesterday’s forum demonstrated. The fact that the tactics used on suspected terrorists were known to have produced false confessions in the past rather than truthful information, however, undermines the strength of the legal argument supporting them.

Yoo’s former OLC colleague, Jay Bybee, however, now a life-tenured judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the target of a campaign for impeachment, has so far remained silent about the matter.

The Illinois state senators just went down the line in a roll-call vote, and one after another, they all said “yes” to the motion to give Blagojevich the boot. Inevitability became reality as the 40-vote threshold for removal was passed at 4:42 pm CST.

Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn will soon be sworn in as governor.

UPDATE: Now they’re voting on a motion to disqualify Blago from future public office. So far it’s unanimous in favor.

“The House’s action today was not a surprise; it was a foregone conclusion,” Blagojevich began calmly. “They’ve been talking about doing it for years.”

He went on to describe his accomplishments as governor, and the state House of Representatives’ efforts to hinder his health care reforms. Flanked by a motley crew of Illinoisians who he said “have benefited from some of these initiatives,” he ranted for minutes on end about breast cancer and kidney conditions.

But he made absolutely no mention of the core issue: his attempted sale of Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat, as alleged by federal prosecutors. Instead, he seemed to think that he had been impeached for his crusade to save lives.

Over and over, he described his health care programs and asked rhetorically, “Is that an impeachable offense?”

The only moments that did not seem thoroughly surreal came at the end of the press conference — but not the very end, when he once again quoted a British poet to prove some point that eluded me — as he maintained his innocence.

“Let me reassert to all of you once more that I am not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing,” he insisted. “I’m confident that at the end of the day I will be properly exonerated. In the meantime I have a job to do for the people.”

Go save lives, Blago! Godspeed!

UPDATE: Here’s the video:

He will now face a trial in front of the full state Senate.

According to the AP, this is the first time in history that an Illinois governor has been impeached.

A helpful analysis from CNN.com notes the following:

Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to be “judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” Democratic senators in recent days have cited that provision when asserting “our Constitutional authority” without further explanation.

But Article 1, Section 3 lists those qualifications: “No person shall be senator who shall not have attained to the age of 30 years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States.” The potential senator must also be an inhabitant of the state from which he or she is chosen. Burris, 71 and a lifelong Illinoisan, certainly meets all those requirements.

It’s looking pretty bad for the Senate, if you ask me.

SCOTUSblog analyzes the leading case on point, Powell v. McCormack, in which the Supreme Court said quite clearly: “The House is without power to exclude any member-elect who meets the Constitution’s requirements for membership.”

Neither the case nor the Constitution say anything about whether the Senate has the power to judge the manner in which the appointment was made — or the person who made it.

As SCOTUSblog writes, there are a bunch of outstanding questions that our ever-confident Senate leaders have apparently “already answered for themselves.”

Among them: Is the power of the Senate (or House) to judge the mode of selection the same whether one was chosen by election or appointment? Does a state have any more power to control the method of filling a vacancy in one of its Senate seats than it does to hold an election for such a seat? How much deference, if any, does the Senate owe to the state’s mode of appointing a Senator?  Is a “taint” perceived in the mode of appointment a sufficient justification for excluding the appointee?

All this may end up being decided by the courts — perhaps ultimately, the Supreme Court. Another likely scenario is that the Senate will drag out its investigation of the Burris selection until Illinois legislators can get their act together to impeach Blagojevich.

In the meantime, as TPM reports today, the Democrats are going to do everything they can to keep Burris from even getting inside the building:

The Democratic leadership’s current contingency plan for next week is reportedly for Burris to be met at the chamber by a doorman telling him he’s not allowed inside. If he still tries to go in, armed police officers could intervene to get him away. Burris told the Los Angeles Times that he wants to avoid a scene and have all of this negotiated before he arrives, but it’s unlikely that he could negotiate his way towards actually being seated.

All of which means that Illinois is likely to be down a U.S. senator for a while.  At least the state will have the satisfaction of making new law — and history — in its struggle to seat one.