John Dean, former counsel to Nixon, writes about attempts at impeachment of either Bush or Cheney:
There Is No Chance Either Bush or Cheney Will Be Removed From Office
The Republican Congress shamed itself when it impeached and tried President William Jefferson Clinton. It was a repeat of what an earlier Republican Congress had done to President Andrew Johnson, following the Civil War. Both proceedings were politics at their ugliest.
Democrats, when they undertook to impeach Richard Nixon, moved very slowly, building bipartisan support for the undertaking. Nixon, of course, resigned, when it became apparent that the House had the votes to impeach and the Senate had the votes to convict, with his removal supported by Democrats and Republicans, and conservatives and liberals alike.
Getting the necessary two-thirds supermajority in support of impeachment in today’s Senate, which is virtually evenly-divided politically, is simply not possible. With forty-nine senators of the 110th Congress members in good standing with the Republican Party, and most of them rock-ribbed conservatives, even if the House produced evidence of Cheney personally water-boarding “Gitmo” detainees in the basement of his home at the Naval Observatory, with Bush looking on approvingly, there are more than thirty-three GOP Senators who still would not vote to convict. (Senate Republicans who have no problem with torture, or with removing the right to habeas corpus, and who refused to exercise any oversight whatsoever of Bush or Cheney, are hardly going to remove these men for actions in which they too are complicit.)
Pelosi and Reid have long understood this reality, and rather than do to Bush and/or Cheney what Republicans did to Clinton - impeach him in the House merely because they had the power to do so and they wanted to tarnish him, only to lose their battle decisively in the Senate - they are simply not going to play the same game. Politically, this is smart. Americans do not want another impeachment, particularly when Bush and Cheney will be out of office in January 2009.
What to do then? Dean’s unique idea is to instead impeach the people under Bush/Cheney. This is allowed by the Constitution and there even is a precedent for it (the impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap, in the aftermath of the Civil War). There are many advantages in this:
Never will “serve” again. “It will be recalled that Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution states: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” (Emphasis added.) After any civil officer has been impeached, under the rules of the Senate, it requires only a simple majority vote to add the disqualification from holding future office.”
Not a distraction to more important legislative business. “In addition, it is likely that the impeachment process of any official in a position below that of the president or vice president, would be treated the same as the impeachment of federal judges. The work is done in both the House and Senate by special subcommittees, so it does not consume the attention of the full bodies until the final votes.”
Stands a good chance of succeeding.
Dean wrote the above in mid-December, so it’s always possible that Bush will go so far out, an impeachment may be the only way to stop him, but check out the full article here.
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