What if the bipartisan foreign policy establishment decided that we cannot afford to have Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld running our foreign policy for another two and a half years? What would they do?
Wake up, folks, because we are seeing the gears in motion. Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher writes, in a column called A Crisis Almost Without Equal:
Our president, in a time of war, terrorism and nuclear intrigue, will likely remain in office for another 33 months, with crushingly low approval ratings that are still inching lower…
…The alarm should be bi-partisan.
…many are starting to look for a way to shorten or short-circuit the extended crisis period.
Mitchell goes on to cite Tom Friedman:
“I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver’s licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now — or take a taxi. … You will not be driving alone. Not with my car.”
“If ours were a parliamentary democracy, the entire Bush team would be out of office by now, and deservedly so. … But ours is not a parliamentary system, and while some may feel as if this administration’s over, it isn’t. So what to do? We can’t just take a foreign policy timeout.”
The problem is unusual. The crisis has been brought about through the influence and policies of the Vice-President and his allies in various government agencies. So, removing the President from office would make matters worse, unless the Vice-President is also removed.
George W. Bush
Any strategy to take away the foreign policy car keys must first eliminate Cheney and Rumsfeld. Only then can the President be challenged. The Generals revolt is only one front in this campaign. The revolt aims to take down Rumsfeld, but the implications are much more far-reaching. The intelligence agencies have been leaking like seives. Nearly a dozen members of the National Security Agency came forward to leak about illegal domestic surveillance. Other members, coalescing around Joe Wilson, have been waging a three year campaign to expose the Vice-President’s role in manipulating the pre-war intelligence. CIA officers leaked evidence of secret detention centers to Dana Priest of the Washington Post. The FBI leaked evidence of CIA torture at Guantanamo.
Now columnists like Tom Friedman are raising questions. Friedman doesn’t call for impeachment, but there can be no other solution to the problems he discusses. Firing Rumsfeld would only be a partial measure.
So far, the revolt against this administration has been limited to factions within the military and intelligence agencies. Republicans on the Hill have acted as a heat shield, covering up or explaining away all evidence of malfeasance. But, should they crack, the strategy is clear. They merely need to open up an investigation of the Office of the Vice-President, expose clear evidence of criminal acts, declare it unacceptable, and force Cheney out. Rummy would be swept out in the same investigation. At that point, Bush would be given a choice. Either he accept a new Vice-President and Secretary of Defense and change his policies, or the investigation will escalate into his office and result in his impeachment.
Should it come to that, the House of Representatives would be able to manipulate the succession. If, for example, the Congress could agree on a replacement (such as John McCain) they could take a number of steps. An Arizona congressperson could step down. John McCain could resign from the Senate. The Governor of Arizona could appoint McCain to the vacant House seat. The House could have a new vote for Speaker. McCain would be elected. And then Bush and Cheney would resign, leading to McCain’s swearing in as President. The Senate would then confirm a Vice-President. The Congress would then restore Hastert to the Speakership.
The country is nearing the point where such far-fetched ponzi schemes are becoming plausible and appealing. If Rove gets indicted, the pressure will ramp up significantly.
Meanwhile, Illinois is debating submitting Article of Impeachment to the House of Representatives.
Oh this would be only too sweet if it were to come to fruition. You make a gal’s heart skip a beat with the prospects you write of.
As you note, the problem is unusual, but it was not unpredictable. This is a time bomb that has been ticking away since late winter, 2002, when they made the final decision to go into Iraq. Or if you want to date it a little further down the line, to the beginning of July 2003, when it was clear that the Baathists had not been beaten, but had simply gone underground until the dust cleared.
The real problem is that there rally is no ‘adult’ in place at the White House, no Alexander Haig to take the reins if things really fall apart. Everyone there is a syncophant who owes his or her position solely to Bush. There is also no one there who has a first rate mind and education. This is what is going to make it so hard to throw the shrub under the bus.
WILL crack — what a bold prediction! Nah, I’m not a fortune-teller 😉 but
Fitz may be getting close, and he might rid us of Cheney; the Abrahamoff investigation will take out some Republicans; fiscal and constitutional conservatives must be having a cow; the media are opening people’s eyes a bit more; and 1/3 of Republicans admit they disapprove of Bush (Fox poll reported by Olbermann).
My head is still spinning around possible McCain gyrations, but I do hope we can impeach before the madman launches an attack on Iran.
I am endorsing a McCain presidency, or even predicting one.
My point was only to illustrate that there is a mechanism to put someone in the Presidency using succession, even if that person is not currently in the House, or in the line of succession.
I assume you meant to type “not”…
Um…yeah.
The succession is simpler if you assume that you can convince both of them to resign or be impeached, then you make sure that the VP goes first. Replace him in the Senate with whomever they choose. Then the President goes.
An intentional version of what happened in Nixon’s case.
Not that I see it happening. Investigations will start in January ’07, lead by Chairman Conyers and Speaker Pelosi. By the time any impeachable offences are confirmed to the satisfaction of the moderates, the presidential elections will already be in full swing. Bush will be a complete lame duck and the incentives to impeach him will be too small, especially as too many members of the Senate are complicit in the current cover ups for them to vote to convict.
The way that I interpreted your post is as follows: Cheney goes first, is replaced by McCain, and gwb is impeached, making McCain president. In that scenario, he basically plays a Gerald Ford role and loses in ’08.
Think that would work.
I’d prefer the Democrats taking back control of the House (and Senate) so we could have a Democrat in the White House, just to piss off the Religious Reich and to maybe restore some sanity to Washington. And your idea scares me because it would give McCain an immediate boost to winning in 2008, and his overtures towards the Religious Reich are troubling — I was hoping he’d be more of a Goldwater Republican, conservative on fiscal issues while moderate/liberal on personal liberties.
But overall, this would give a way for Republicans to come correct and right this nation, and hopefully before BushCo. says, “Aw, screw it, we’ve got nothing to lose,” and drops the Big One on Iran, or Iraq, or some other nation that’s bugging us…
that is actually a factor in all of this that does not work in Bush’s favor.
If the GOP gambles on keeping Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld through to November, and they lose control of the House and perhaps the Senate, the cost of impeachment would be a Pelosi presidency.
Of course, Pelosi could still negotiate a settlement, whereby, in exchange for key Republican votes, she would temporarily step down as speaker to allow for a consensus candidate to be elected speaker and succeed to the Presidency.
I’ve always looked at impeachment as a twofer.
The case for impeaching Cheney is better than the case for impeaching Bush, the actual wrongdoing as far as fixing intelligence on Iraq was mostly tied to his office. And how high do gas prices have to go before the media starts pressuring for the de-classification of all of his energy meetings from 2001?
I’m estimating, but I think gas prices around the time of Bush’s first inauguration were under $1.20 a gallon. When I left Alabama in the summer of 1998 to move to California, it was possible to find gas here under $1 a gallon, and that wasn’t that long ago. It’s funny how the oil companies started screwing us right about the time Cheney set our newand improved energy policy.
McCain as president and Hastert as Speaker (again!) is not appealing to me.
Unfortunately, impeachment will do little to change current realities, seems to me. By the time the investigations and processes are done, Bush/Cheney’s term will be about over anyway. Which is why I think any impeachment move should focus on Bush as a way to tie his hands against acting out further insanity. Going after Rumsfeld/Cheney is just another instance of giving Bush a pass, as if he’s a good president brought low by treacherous underlings. The buck still has to stop at the top. Otherwise this country is in even more serious long-term trouble than we thought — which is almost unimaginable.
I’m all for impeachment because to let Bush get away with his crimes would be to encourage impunity in all future administrations. But if we want to neutralize Bush’s power to commit evil, the place to do it is Congress. Don’t forget, Bush got away with his shit largely because Congress abdicated its constitutional responsibilities. A Dem Congress next year will have all the power it needs to check Bush as the Constitution intended. Impeachment, yes, but for forcing change, Congress is the prize to keep our eyes on. And, as we’ve so painfully learned, a Dem Congress will require the same unwavering scrutiny.
but damn me to hell if I’m going to start blaming our soldiers for Iraq just so I can feel like at least somebody is taking some heat for all of this shit! Just about totally fed up with the “Do Nothing but wait for the AntiBush fairy to crown me” Democrats too…..many of them voted for a resolution that made the Iraq War possible. I do not and will not fault any of them for that given the lay of the land that day. To sit here though and do nothing while innocent people die and die and die every single fucking day while they wait for that fucking AntiBush fairy to Ding them on the head with it’s magic wand in November just fries my ass!
and it still doesn’t guarantee that one single soldier will be sent home from Iraq anytime in the near future! Nobody in their right mind would want the job because there isn’t any way to walk away a winner, only many different kinds of Wieners!
If I were proposing strategy to those who would seek to remove the most malignant part of the Bush regime from power, I’d not spend too much time considering Congress as a venue within which to bring about meaningful change in executive branch behavior.
Instead I’d focus on developing a way to guide Bush the imbecile to the very simple elemental understanding that if he aspires to have any kind of praiseworthy legacy at all; if he wants to be recorded in history as a great leader, he has to recognize that the biggest threat to such a grand legacy is the insane policy direction he’s receiving from Cheney and his neocons.
Bush needs to understand, (in the way that only petulant, angry and stupid people understand), that the more he listens to the Cheneyites, the more impossible it becomes for him to attain the historical, (and perhaps the spiritual), grandeur he yearns for.
Of course, finding the right sort of person with the ability to get this message across to the hapless Bush will not be easy, and as a commenter on a thread on another blog recently alluded to, “Mr. Rogers” of childrens TV fame died recently, else he’d be the perfect one to deliver such wisdom.
Commenters here are correct in saying that any impeachment hearings by a Democratic Congress will begin in January of 2007 and drag on so long that the 2008 election will intervene, making them moot.
The real Congressional weapon is money . . . in the spring of 2007, when annual budgets come up, and supplemental defense spending comes up, the House can, and should, simply stop all funding for foreign wars, except for the process of bringing our troops home.
Or, they can set aside fully ten percent of the Pentagon’s bloated budget for Veterans Affairs, effective immediately.
Either action will stop the military machinery in its tracks, and both actions would enjoy popular support from the great majority of Americans.