Impeaching Bush and Cheney Can't Happen, Alas

So far I have resisted efforts to get me to support impeaching G.W. Bush and Richard Cheney, though I detest both men and think them criminals who lied with intent to hoodwink Congress and the people and military leaders to support going to war in Iraq.

This Congress, controlled by Democrats, will not impeach the president and vice president for a simple reason: Democrats do not have the necessary votes in the Senate, where they have only a one-vote majority. It takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove a president or vice president once the House has impeached.

Even if the Democrats had enough members to kick Bush and Cheney back into private life, that would not occur because that would topsy-turvy next year’s presidential election, for which four Democratic senators are running: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd.

Booting Bush and Cheney from office by law would make Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, the acting president of the U.S. and therefore the leading Democratic candidate if she wanted for election as president next year.

Pelosi would find it hard to resist running to make the job hers for another four years. Democrats would find it hard to resist her running.

So Clinton, Obama, Biden and Dodd would be fools now to vote to sweep Bush and Cheney out into the gutter in which they belong.

It ain’t going to happen, alas. There’s no point in fussing and burning hormones trying to make it happen this year or next. A waste of time and energy.