Dogs and Cats Living Together
Many of my earliest posts were motivated by a desire to show that the wild-eyed talk of impeachment-- remember that, back when the Cubs might be going to the World Series?-- was bad for the country, bad for the party that would propose it, and most importantly, extremely unlikely to happen, no matter how hot a topic it was on progressive websites read by the .0001% of us gaga about politics a year and a half before an election:
Impeachment dreams were never very realistic. Not this close to an election, when they would have introduced a most unwelcome reminder of the worst parts of the late 90s into Hillary Clinton's campaign. She had no interest in 24-hour talk-TV yammering about blow jobs, the meaning of is, executive privilege, Democratic payback-- and how we wasted the late 90s obsessing about such trivialities and playing tit-for-tat (so to speak) while our enemies planned 9/11.Nor was there much more stomach for it among Congressional leaders, who never care for processes with unforeseeable endings. The big problem with the impeachment of Bush (or Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez; your real impeachment hounds plan to take out as many of their enemies in one go as Michael Corleone at a baptism) was that the desire for impeachment long preceded any specific charge.
Indeed, everyone who dreams of it seems to have a different high crime they're high on promoting... The Congressional leadership has no interest in letting the dogs loose to chase so many wild geese, just to satisfy the bloodlust at Daily Kos and The Nation and Camp Casey (and thus sew up the furthest left 10% of the electorate for the Dems, while alienating much of the swing voting middle).
But even I could not have imagined the delicious bit of comedy which was set loose in Congress today, the production of "Capitol Hi-Jinks" starring the honorable Moe, the distinguished Curly and the gentleman from Larry.
It started when Dennis Kucinich (D-Planet Zontar) announced his intention to impeach Dick Cheney. This was a typically inscrutable move from Kucinich, since removing Cheney would, so far as anyone could see, accomplish exactly zippo. Bush would still be president, and even if you believe Cheney secretly runs his brain, well, it's not the powers of the vice presidency that enable him to do so. If Bush wanted Cheney to stop by every Thursday and give him his orders for the next week, he could. (I don't endorse this view of how this administration works, by the way, I'm just saying.)
Steny Hoyer, who by all accounts is the Jeeves to Speaker Pelosi's Wooster, immediately set out to kill Dennis' Plan 9 From Outer Space by tabling it. With most Democrats and all Republicans being happy to diss impeachment as sooo last summer, this should have been an easy piece of stage management.
Except the Republicans, still ticked about SCHIP and other stuff, decided not to do Hoyer any favors. In the middle of the vote, Republicans started changing their votes to go against tabling and for debate on impeachment-- and soon the impeachment resolution was headed for actual debate on the floor of the House. With a substantial number of Democrats already having voted for it, confident that the measure would be tabled anyway, the Republicans easily produced a majority of 251-162 in favor of debate.
In a panic that debate and thus democracy might break out (Gentlemen, you can't debate issues in here, this is the House!), Hoyer was forced to send it to Judiciary instead to be buried.
And so impeachment moves closer to reality... or at least comedy... thanks to Republican support. Let us salute the 165 brave Republicans who did what was right, not what party loyalty demanded, and crossed party lines to support impeachment of their own sitting vice president... and deliver a big fat cream pie right in Steny Hoyer's kisser.
