Triple Jeopardy
 
The Democrats, to my utter amazement, have started moving forward with their big agenda to reform Washington. From putting a loophole-riddled but good-start stopper on the practice of 'eamarks' and some other egregious pork-barrel tactics, to pushing ahead with the nearest thing to an end-the-war stance a bunch of lemmings is capable of, the now-reigning Dems have shown themselves to be serious about improving the government's performance.

It's refreshing and it gives me the teeniest of tiny hopes-- because as they go forward, the Dems will pick up two things: the courage to do more, and even more importantly, Republican support. On the subject of Iraq, escalation there, and by proxy Iran and escalation there, moderate Republicans have started joining the ranks of the sane. What could follow is a further schism betwen executive and legislative wings of the Republican monolith, which could lead to the rightest-wing side of Congress discovering that Bush, Cheney, and their Unitary Executive don't give a fuck about anybody, including their buddies in Congress. That would be a good thing. Most Congresshumans are ultimately not radicals, but rather devotees of the orthodoxy of ordinary. It will become clear to them as they are opposed by the Executive in all sorts of weird ways that the Bush junta has no respect for them, any more than the Democrats.

Impeachment is still vital, but theres no sense rushing it. Especially now that the Bush gang have started purging the Department of Justice, hoping to whittle down the ranks of viable enemies. Between four and seven US attorneys have abruptly been replaced, using a sneak clause hidden in the latest version of the Patriot Act that does away with pesky Senate confirmation hearings.

So there are a couple of constitutional crises waiting to happen: does Bush get to send more troops into Iraq without the congressional say-so? Congress weakened its position on the subject by abrogating its historical war-making powers on the other end of the same war; it will have to wrest its vested powers back to stop the next one. That would be Iran. So executive war-making authority is crisis one, by my reckoning.

Then we have the exec's ability to hire and fire folks in positions normally overseen by the Senate. That's a constitutional crisis, albeit a smaller one-- but it's clear Alberto Gonzalez, the worst Attorney General since John Ashcroft, fully intends to distort the law in favor of a politburo-style executive, and that ain't the way it's wrote in the Constitution.

Also a crisis of the constitutional variety: the Penatgon just announced its rules for trying and finding guilty its 'detainees' in the Total War Against Terror. The tools they reserve for the purpose include statements made under torture (code word= coerced) and hearsay testimony, which is another word for "because we said so". This is insanity, of course, and illegal in most civilized places. And it matters. Because anybody can be 'detained', and anybody can end up in front of one of these made-up courts. You want hearsay admitted in evidence against you?

So where are the American people on all this? Let's go to the most biased, shitty network in America to get results they will have jiggered in favor of Bush as much as possible, and see how rosy those results are.

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