Like you (and practically every liberal I know or read about), I'm ecstatic over the prospect of our retaking the House of Representatives. The cream on top will be if some of the latest projections turn out to be correct, and we also get the Senate. In that case, I wonder if impeachment of both Bush and Cheney -- however unlikely -- would nonetheless be a more reasonable topic for discussion among progressives. Anyhow, as a number of folks have pointed out, the real power will come with the power to investigate. Legislation won't easily get through. The flow of pure crap out of Congress will, presumably stop or at least grind to a vastly slower pace (a huge benefit all in itself), but one can't easily imagine very many urgent problems being legislatively addressed given Bush's veto powers (not to mention the very real fear every Democrat ought to have that any legislation handing any new work to the Administration would inevitably be corrupted and misused by the Bush Administration). In short, don't hold your breath waiting for a national health care system, or real tax reform undoing some of the damage of the last 12 years.

But that power to investigate! Oh, joy, oh, joy. History has shown that even if the shredders and payoffs and Republican Code of Omerta can hide 99% of the corruption and wrongdoing, 1% can still be got out ... and that may well be more than enough to put truckloads of rightwingers in prison. Give us the power of the subpoena and a forum to use it in, and the mind reels at the possibilities.

Yet, I urge my fellow progressives to expect nothing, hope for nothing, believe only in that which actually happens. Because the problem is simple:

Bush has the power of the pardon.

His daddy already used it with unscrupulous abandon. (And please save me the comparisons with Clinton and Marc Rich. That may have been a ghastly mistake -- what possessed Clinton to do it I'll never know -- but neither it nor any of Clinton's other many pardons appeared to be aimed at giving his Administration a full-fare get-out-of-jail-free-card for obscene violations of the Constitution and federal law ... unlike Papa Bush's pardons).

I don't believe in predicting the future, so I won't start now. But I do fear that no matter what is discovered about the Bush Administration, none of those people will be held to true account. Pre-emptive pardons could gut any ability of prosecutors to go after the most brazen of criminal deeds; post-indictment or post-conviction pardons would surely cover the rest.

We will do best, I think, if we grit our teeth now. Just expect that the pardons will fly out of the White House, while hoping to be pleasantly surprised if they don't. Bush, a lame-duck, has no compelling reason not to use that power. He and the immoral thugs around him have shown absolutely no restraint on anything to date, and I think it would be out of character for them not to do the same with pardons. The only thing that might discourage him would be the (unlikely) case where he and/or Rove and/or Cheney came to believe that using the power would harm GOP chances for a comeback.

So ... if we proceed with this assumption -- that no conviction will stand, that no man among the throngs of thugs and criminals in the Bush orbit will spend a minute in prison -- then we must ask ourselves: what should Democrats do? What is our best fall-back position? If the biggest prizes are irredeemably beyond our reach, what is the next best thing to reach for?

I actually have a couple of tentative answers. But as I'm not a lawyer, to a certain extent they can only be food for thought rather than explicit prescriptions.

My first thought is: if you can't put these bastards in prison, at least expose them as the criminals they are. Nail them, not with the idea that you will ever send them to jail, but rather with the idea that you will freight them -- for the rest of their lives -- as known traitors, con men, sleazeballs, and worse. The value of this is, I concede, limited. That is the lesson I take from the Bush Sr. pardons of Casper Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George, and Robert McFarlane ... criminals all and all of them now lionized by the Right. Abrams, for God's sake, came right back to resume his vile work.

Nonetheless, getting the history out into the open and written down would be a worthy thing.

A second thought occurs to me, a strategy quite simple: work on the assumption we'll retain control of the House through and beyond 2008, and re-take the White House also. Bush is there for another two years, and another two years of the Bush Administration's awful incompetence should -- hopefully -- sour the American people even more to the GOP. Run investigations in the meantime, but don't push too hard for criminal indictments. Leave 'em hanging, to the extent that the federal statute of limitations will permit. Bush might find it hard to start handing out open-ended, blind pardons -- "Paul Wolfowitz is hereby pardoned of anything he might have done during my administration that anyone might ever deem to have been illegal" -- if, in fact, Wolfowitz is neither under active investigation nor actual indictment. And then, about two minutes after Bush is FINALLY out of power, start unsealing all the indictments.

[...] I think that if Bush does use (abuse) the power of the pardon, then it'll be high time for the Democrats to begin pushing for a Constitutional amendment to clarify what those powers can and cannot be used for. Roughly, I'd like to see it made clear that a president cannot (1) use the power of the pardon as Gerald Ford did, as blanket immunity to prosecution. Its use should be restricted to people who've actually been convicted of crimes (perhaps with a narrow exception carved out for those jailed on contempt charges -- such as Susan McDougal -- who've already served X number of months or more). And, (2) the power cannot be used by a president on any of his own appointees (perhaps excepting the power to commute in death penalty cases), or himself and his VP for that matter.

If investigations net a pile of top Republicans and conservatives, threatening them with long trials and the potential for long prison sentences; and if Bush then hands out stacks of pardons; then, I think, enacting a Constitutional amendment to close the loopholes may not be nearly as difficult as one might imagine.