Impeachment: If It's Not About Punishment, What Is It About?

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Friday December 08, 2006 · 6:34 AM PST

2006/12/08 · 06:34

One thing that many if not most of the pro-impeachment people keep saying is that it's not about revenge or punishment or whatever, but about using impeachment to try to make sure no future president follows Bush's example. (Though many pro-impeachers are openly saying that they DO want to see him punished -- at least one person last night over at MyDD has mentioned hanging as a punishment for Bush.)

Actually, limiting the powers of signing statements (or eliminating them altogether) would be a much more effective way to try to rein in the executive branch; impeachment wouldn't do anything except show future presidents, once again, that the way to tie up a Congress controlled by the opposition party for years on end is to give them impeachment fever. Oh, and it wouldn't punish Bush one iota, either. (More after the jump.)

As Chris, Kos, and pretty much anyone else who knows anything about Congressional workings knows, a full-bore impeachment drive by the Democratic Congress would wind up stalling out the rest of the Democratic agenda -- which is already being sabotaged by the outgoing GOP Congress' refusal to work on any legislation before adjourning, thus guaranteeing a HUGE legislative backlog for Reid and Pelosi when Congress reconvenes next month.

People forget that impeachments take a LONG TIME and pretty much bring Congress to a halt. Bush's term will have expired before he could be removed by impeachment -- so how does this "punish" him or show that we are "serious" about accountability? Even with dropping everything else on their agenda, the GOP Congress during Clinton's second term still took two years to get to the point where a vote could be held in the Senate -- and Clinton was acquitted. (And this was with the media fully in the Republican Congress' corner. Anyone think we'll have the GOP/Media Complex backing us if we try to impeach Bush? Me neither.)

Furthermore, let's assume for the sake of argument that by a miracle, the impeachment process whipped through both Houses of Congress AND that the Senate voted to convict and remove Bush before January of 2009. All that does is give us President Cheney. Do you really want that? I sure don't.

Hint to the wise: If you must impeach someone, impeach Cheney instead of Bush. It'd be much, MUCH easier to pull off. Better yet, bring criminal or civil charges against him, or civil charges against Bush -- that would be even easier to do, and it would free up the Democrats in Congress to actually do the people's business, like going through the United States Code and undoing all the land mines BushCo's embedded therein.

And now I'll sit back and wait for the inevitable reflexive and emotion-driven accusations of selling out, whoredom, cowardice, being a GOP plant, and whatever else can be dreamed up to be thrown my way.

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