At Calitics today, David Dayen has a fantastic piece outlining the case and procedure to impeach Judge Jay Bybee in light of his recently released 2002 torture memo. Emptywheel today has some of the gut-wrenching details of the torture that came from the Bybee memo, and Dayen lays out why this needs to come to Bybee's doorstep now:

As many people noted yesterday, Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel whose name appears as the author of the August 1, 2002 memo justifying and authorizing clear acts of torture by the CIA (some argue that John Yoo wrote the memo, but Bybee signed it), now works as a federal judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, with a lifetime appointment.  He sits in judgment when we have clear evidence that his judgment is fractured.  In just this particular memo, he agreed that waterboarding "constitutes the imminent threat of death" and still allowed its use.  He twisted the research of sleep deprivation experts to justify the torturous delivery of harm to prisoners through this technique.  He found the rationales to explain away his own legal exposure and that of his superiors, while clearly understanding these techniques to be wrong when applied by other countries.

As it happens, the California Democratic Party is holding its convention next weekeend, and will consider a resolution from grassroots activists calling for Jay Bybee's impeachment from the 9th Circuit. As Dayen notes, it has already been passed unanimously by the Los Angeles Democratic Club, and is viable and extremely important now at the state level.