Election Postmortem: What's Next?

By Dave Lindorff
Created Nov 8 2006 - 3:26pm

Here's the way to look at the Election Day outcome: If the U.S. were a
parliamentary democracy, Bush would be history. Our self-proclaimed "war
president" has lost a vote of confidence, not by the members of his party,
but by the people of the United States.

Of course, we don't live in a parliamentary democracy, so we're still stuck
with the same megalomaniacal leader, even though the control of the Congress
appears to be passing to the opposition party. (As of this writing, the new
House will be firmly in the hands of the Democrats by a bigger margin than
the current House is in the hands of Republicans, and the Senate appears
headed towards Democratic control also, albeit by the narrowest of margins:
1 Lieberman.)

So the question is: what next?

We're already hearing a lot from the mainstream media about how this was all
about voters wanting less extremism and more civility in government.

Bull!

This was about voters who have had it with neocon imperialist militarism,
had it with government lying, had it with corruption, and had it with
campaign tactics that equate opposition to the president with support for
terrorism.

We'll also be hearing a lot about how a change of 30 or 32 seats in the
House from one party to another is no big deal.

Nonsense! Not only is it a big deal by historical standards--it is an
especially big deal given the historically unprecedented extreme to which
the Republicans in control of state legislatures had gerrymandered districts
over the last decade to insure their candidates' re-election. It is also an
unusually big turnover to occur at a time when the nation has over 160,000
troops tied down in bitter fighting in two countries--Iraq and Afghanistan.
To have the public undercut the president at such a time is an extraordinary
act by the voters, who normally tend towards jingoistic support of
presidents when American troops are dying.

Of course it's true that some of the Democrats who will be replacing
Republican office-holders are conservative (some are liberal, too). That's
not the point, though. They are almost all honorable people who entered
their races as underdogs earlier this year, not expecting to win, and who
ended up winning because the voting public, whether liberal or conservative,
wants them to clean the Stygian Stables, which have filled up with six years
with of crap and bullshit.

Now the Democratic leadership in Congress doesn't see it that way. They seem
to be buying into the media illusion that what the public wants is civility
in government and respect for the president. That's certainly how Rep. Nancy
Pelosi, the likely new House majority leader, puts it (even though her home
district in San Francisco voted 61 percent for an impeachment resolution).

But civility and respect are not going to get the job done.

First of all, let's consider that there are still two possibilities: one is
that the two houses of Congress both go narrowly Democratic; the other is
that only the House goes Democratic, while the Senate ends up more narrowly
Republican, or perhaps tied, with Dick Cheney holding the tie-breaking vote
as President of the Senate. In the latter two scenarios civility would be
death, since Senate Republicans would be anything but civil. The only way
Democrats could have any power would be by acting as obstreperously and
obstructively as possible, to prevent more damage, by using their
investigative power in the House to lay out the crimes of this
administration as clearly as possible. If both houses of Congress end up in
Democratic hands, they will be in the position to start passing legislation.
But they will not be able to undo the damage caused over the past six years
to the Constitution and to the nation because Bush will be able to veto
their bills. Worse yet, even if they can manage in some cases to get enough
Republican support on some issues to override a veto, Bush will use his
"signing statement" ploy to block them, as he has already done over 800
times to legislation passed by a Republican Congress.

Clearly, in either event, the only appropriate response is for a Democratic
House to initiate serious investigations into administration abuse of power,
criminality, deceit and incompetence, and ultimately, to initiate
impeachment proceedings.

It is perhaps wishful thinking to believe that Bush, as richly as he
deserves it, will be impeached for war crimes. We can leave that to future
prosecutors, either in a better post-Bush America or in other nations, since
war crimes don't have a statute of limitations, and Bush has a good 20 years
left in him if he manages to stay off the bottle.

That said, there are crimes and constitutional violations that even
Republicans should agree call for his impeachment (and in some cases
Cheney's). Among these are:

* The signing statements, in which Bush claims that as commander in chief he
does not need to accept or enforce laws passed by the Congress. This is such
an egregious abuse of power and undermining of the Constitution that if it
is allowed to continue, with future presidents continuing the practice and
citing Bush as precedent, Congress will cease to have any real
constitutional function.

* The NSA warrantless spying. Democrats need to take a leadership role and
demand to know what this program is all about. Clearly it's not about spying
on suspected terrorists, as Bush claims, because the secret Foreign
Surveillance Intelligence Court judges would have no problem approving
warrants for that. It has to be something so outrageous that Bush is afraid
to present it to those famously accommodating judges. The case needs to be
made that this is a flat-out felony and a breach of the Fourth Amendment,
and that it has already been so ruled by a federal judge.

* The outing of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame and the selective release
of the Iraq National Intelligence Estimate in an effort to damage a
critic--Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. This was exactly
the kind of abuse of government power that led to an impeachment article
being voted in the House Judiciary Committee against President Richard
Nixon. Moreover, Democrats need to make the case that this attack on Wilson
was motivated by a darker goal: the need to discredit someone who was
exposing one of the Bush administration's gravest crimes--namely faking
evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

* Lying the country into a deadly, costly and interminable war in Iraq. It
is clear now that Bush knew the uranium ore story, the aluminum tubes story,
the Saddam links to Al Qaeda story and the germ weapons story, were all
lies. It is clear that Bush had plans to invade Iraq from before he even
assumed office in 2001, that 9/11 was just a pretext to do it, and that his
claims to the American people and to Congress that he wanted a "diplomatic
solution" to Iraq's alleged WMD threat was a lie and a fraud. He must be
impeached for this bloody travesty.

* Obstruction and lying to the Congress and the 9-11 Commission. The
president, in what is an abuse of power and possibly even an act of treason,
refused to provide testimony and evidence demanded by the Senate
Intelligence Committee and by the 9-11 Commission, and himself refused to
testify under oath or with any record being made of his answers, and had
members of his administration lie to both bodies. This willful obstruction
has put the nation in jeopardy, since without knowing what went wrong or
even what went on before and on 9-11, there is no way to prevent another
such attack. This is a clear impeachable crime.

* Bribery. For some time it was not clear whether the stench of money
scandals would reach into the White House. Bush claimed he didn't even know
Jack Abramoff, even as members of Congress were falling like 10-pins. Now,
however, we have learned that there are myriad pictures of Abramoff and his
buddy Bush together, that Abramoff visited the White House so often it was
practically a second home, and that he even managed to have his own
secretary move over to work for Bush's closest confident (and "brain" by
some accounts) Karl Rove, the better to facilitate the money-for-favors
exchanges. This is corruption on the scale of the Warren Harding
administration, and it calls for impeachment, not respect. While they"re at
it, Democrats in the House should also investigate the oil industry's and
Halliburton's financial tentacles in the White House and Blair House.

* The Loss of New Orleans. Bush's disastrous inaction as Katrina headed for
New Orleans, and his even worse inaction after the disaster was apparent, is
a classic violation of the presidential oath to "take care" that the laws
are faithfully administered. The president had a duty to initiate drastic
emergency action that only he could authorize, and instead he campaigned,
played golf and guitar, and entertained Sen. John McCain, while over a
thousand Americans were allowed to die and a major US city drowned. That is
a clear impeachable offense.

American voters don't want politeness. We want our country back. We have
just proved to Republicans that we will punish lying and corruption. In the
next election, Democrats should be on notice that we will also punish
cowardice and inaction.

A great start for newly empowered Democrats would be to revoke or rephrase
the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was passed
to authorize Bush to invade Afghanistan and to pursue Al Qaeda. Bush has
been claiming ever since that the 2001 AUMF made him permanent "commander in
chief" in an unending "War" on Terror, with the right to ignore the courts
and acts of Congress. It is clearly in Congress's power to redefine that
AUMF more clearly, to make it unambiguously clear that it did not authorize
the president to be generalissimo, that it was referring exclusively to
combat outside the U.S., that it expects him to stay within the law and the
Constitution under the resolution, and that the AUMF itself in any case has
an expiration date. This is a move that even some Republicans--especially
after their recent drubbing--will support.

The new Congress should also promptly revoke the military commissions law,
and especially the parts that revoke habeas corpus, that grant the president
and his gang retroactive immunity from prosecution for authorizing torture,
and that undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, making it easier for a president
to declare martial law. Again, it should be possible to get significant
Republican support for this effort.

Although it doesn't deserve it, the Democratic Party has by default been
given a chance in this off-year election. So far, the leadership is showing
every sign of preparing to blow it.

That means it's up to us voters to make sure elected Democrats in Congress
get the message, first by voting them into power, and then by riding them
hard to make sure they take aggressive action to put the administration in
the dock and rescue the Constitution and the country. A good start would be
to go to Starting an Impeachment Movement [1].
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson