Let me say that I believe that of the two people who have been president who deserved impeachment and removal from office, George W. Bush is incontrovertibly one of them. That said, I am deeply concerned now as ever I have been about all this impeachment talk. It simply is not realistic, and it is not realistic on many, many levels. It concerns me that we might engage it. It concerns me what would happen in the unlikely event it succeeded.
Among many people at daily kos, what I have to say will not be well received, but I might as well express my mind on the subject. Everyone else does.
First, we have to win control House of Representatives. I grant that prospect is at least possible, although it is by no means certain. Once we have won the House of Representatives, we must engage a process that will consume the House for at least the first several months that we Democrats have taken it. The first thing we Democrats do when we take power is not to attend to the people's welfare; we start a process that could take on the appearance of political vendetta.
Let's say that we Democrats were able to slam articles of impeachment through the House of Representatives. We still would have to get two-thirds of the senators to concur on at least one of those articles. Even if we are somehow to gain a majority in the Senate, there is no way that we will get a two-thirds majority, and I can't foresee enough Republicans setting a firebomb to their own party through the removal of the president.
But to humor all of you who so desperately want this process to go forward, let's assume that Republicans in the Senate are suddenly possessed of a civic mindedness that heretofore they have not exhibited. Doesn't impeachment presume that something better is left in the wake of a successful effort to impeach the President?
The whole line of succession is an uninterrupted disaster. At the moment, it is Cheney, Hastert, Stevens, Rice, Rumsfield. On and on, one disastrous possibility on top of another. One way to remove a brain tumor is to cut off the sufferer's head, but is the second state of the sufferer better than the first? Oh, but Pelosi will be the Speaker of the House; Nancy Pelosi will be president. I return to our Republican friends in the Senate whose votes we shall require to remove Bush and Cheney at the same time. I admit the Rethugs are obtuse, but however insensitive they may be, I am certain they will recognize that Speaker Pelosi will be president if they remove Bush and Cheney in one stroke.
Well, there is, you might counter, the symbolism thing. At least we shall be on record that we despised this man and everything he did. Let us seek a pyrrhic victory for the sake of the public record. But let us imagine that the Senate took up the charges and did not achieve a two-thirds majority. What happens then? The President will be completely unfettered of any political threat. What shall we do then with a George Bush who has survived the impeachment process? And having spent all of our political capital on a failed drive to remove the president from office, how shall we save the Republic?
Paint me a scenario with this impeachment idea. It either is not real, or it is not desirable.
We have one and only one project. We must save the Constitution. The real work before us is to save the Constitution. There and only there is where the future lies. If Senators are considering a Constitutional Amendment to define the limits of the President's wartime powers, we must go there. I know that some will argue that if we pass such an amendment, it will say that the President has acted legally. We all know that he has not, but since impeachment and removal is impracticable, let's let the Constitution specifically say the President does not possess the powers that George W. Bush claims the President possesses.
The project is not to get even with George W. Bush and his cronies. The project is to save the country. Kossacks, let's change our meme from the impracticable to the practicable. We are doomed to the next three years, but the President is creating precedents that will last for the greatly foreshortened life of our Republic. Let us save the Republic by saving the Constitution.