That you leap to impeachment as the first thing to do in this situation shows that you are a true believer in the state religion, the worship of the President of the United States as if he were some sort of god-emperor who embodies the state in his august person. Our god-emperor has proven to be a bad person who has done bad things, and for the Leader, the Chosen One who embodies our country, to be impure, casts a stain on us all, a stain that will only be removed if we sacrifice the failed god on the smoking alter of impeachment. You don’t seem to want us to return to a republic, but to some dank theocracy, just with a new god-emperor ascending a throne cleansed by the blood sacrifice of his predecessor. Foregive me if I take a pass on that.

The republican critique of what has gone so wrong in the Bush years, and only somewhat less wrong for the last two generations, is not that this particular President has misused his godlike powers, it’s that he and his post-WWII predecessors have had the legitimate, publically-exercised powers of Congress, systematically transferred to a President who is allowed to wield them behind closed doors, as his private right. The legitimate powers of Congress are sweeping, but are limited by the fact that they must be wielded by two competing committees of 100 and 435 members, respectively, who must conduct their business, the people’s business, in the open. The same sweeping powers, no longer limited by public oversight, and concentrated in one person, truly are god-like, and are completely incompatible with a republican form of government when put in one set of hands, out of the public purview.

If you want us to get our republic back, the answer is not to impeach the President, the answer is to reduce him to his proper, Constitutionally-prescribed, impotence and irrelevance. Congress makes the laws, the President has the duty to faithfully execute them. He is the servant, Congress the master. The power of the purse allows Congress, with a simple majority vote, or even just a majority of the majority that controls the legislative agenda, not the 2/3 needed for conviction on impeachment, to remove every executive officer and employee except the President and the Vice-President, by simply not funding their positions, and to eliminate any govt program by not funding it again. These can be reconstituted at the same time, but without their Presidential appointees, and no longer under the President’s supervisory authority. He can’t commit any more crimes without his minions, and Congress could take away all his minions except Cheney. Well, I guess he and Cheney could sneak out at night to knock off convenience stores, but not having minions will definitely limit their ongoing capacity to commit crimes.

This approach is infinitely flexible, in that Congress can get rid of programs and personnel and change lines of authority with as much selectivity and as gradually, as seems indicated by the problem each particular executive department is having from BushCo control, and by the political sensitiviy of various programs. As we have seen already with war-funding, of course any attempt to use the power of the purse will be met with a game of budgetary chicken from the President. Obviously, troops in the field was the worst possible place for Congress to start, if it had in mind a comprehensive program to reassert its Constitutional mandate to run the govt. They should start with someone like Nancy Nord, whom no one will miss if she goes splat when Bush fails to swerve aside in a game of budgetary chicken. Enough of his minions who can be safely eliminated go splat, and he’ll be forced to come up with some strategy. As Congress starts to take back the govt, dept by dept, he’ll either resign in frustration, retreat to the Oval Office and let Congress take his toys away from him, or he’ll fight, and the utter chaos created by his attempts to fight de-funding will get those 16 Republican senators you need for your impeachment idea, off the fence.

I am not making the claim that my approach is better than yours because yours is impractical. Conviciton on impeachment actually has a better chance than Congress reasserting its authority of winning the At All Likely to Happen sweepstakes. The problem is that our present Congress does not want the govt back. It’s much easier to imagine 67 senators wanting to deep-six Dubya than even 25 of them wanting to run the govt. But at least my proposal would accomplish something besides making you feel a little better about our nations’s moral superiority for the moment. I say “for the moment” because, even if we get rid of Dubya, if all we do in the face of dictatorial powers vested de facto in the Presidency is to replace this bad emperor with a (hopefully) good emperor, then sooner or later that hope will fail, and we will see a Hitler find his way into the office. Let someone with Dubya’s malign intent, but with some of the intelligence and work ethic that he lacks, into his office as presently constituted, and then you will see some real crimes, some real stain on the honor of the United States, something that will be remembered longer and with more horror than the Third Reich.

The problem isn’t this President, bad as he is. The problem is the Presidency. We’ll never cut it back down to its proper Constitutional size during the reign of a good emperor. Only the reign of a bad emperor has the prospect of making people consider that, compared to a republic, imperium may be an inherently bad, maladaptive, form of govt.