Bush Legacy: Presidents Can Be Impeached After They Leave Office
If Alberto Gonzalez gets punk’d at speaking engagements, and Donald Rumsfeld has to be whisked out of France to avoid a war crimes indictment. what does the future hold for George W. Bush after he leaves office one year and six days from now?
Just as hindsight shows that Americans 30 years ago could have prevented the abuses of Bush and Cheney by prosecuting and imprisoning Nixon in 1974, we owe it to future generations of Americans to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for their crimes and incompetence today.
Chris Hedges probably has it right:
Bush will soon be reduced to the cipher he once was, left to spend the rest of his life trying to salvage a legacy of shame and deceit. In a just world he would be put on trial, if not by the International Criminal Court of Justice then by the U.S. Congress. He would be forced to face up to his lies and wars of aggression. But the moral rot that infects the nation has seeped into the bowels of the legislative as well as the executive branch.
There are many organizations and efforts dedicated to the impeachment of George Bush. And Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) is leading a drive to impeach Dick Cheney — if you haven’t signed his online petition, do it now. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced articles of impeachment against the vice president last spring.
But there is one insurmountable obstacle to impeachment this year, and it is not Speaker Pelosi — it’s the continued support for Bush by Republicans in Congress. Unless and until it is expedient for them to get rid of Bush and Cheney, the congressional Republicans have shown that they will block any move to hold them accountable.
So while it looks likely that the millions of Americans who believe the Bush-Cheney regime has committed impeachable acts — taking the country to war based on lies, betraying a secret operation that tracked the WMD black market, spying on Americans without warrants, torturing prisoners and firing U.S. attorneys without cause, to name a few — will have to settle for the cold comfort of watching Bush and Cheney grow old in disgrace, there is another option for bringing them to justice:
