Exercising Investigative Powers Could Spell the End for Cheney and Bush 
It was Dick Cheney who, prior to the voter uprising against the Republicans last Tuesday, stated emphatically that his team will continue governing the same way regardless of what happened. This was synonymous with his comment after the 2000 election decided by a one-vote Supreme Court majority after Bush lost to Al Gore in the popular vote category.
Bush's talk about holding no grudges and smiling for the cameras during a breakfast with Nancy Pelosi amounted to no more than a head feint. He hopes to be able to accomplish what Cheney stated he intended to do before the voting, but in order to realize that objective he needs to survive in office.
While Nancy Pelosi has stated that an impeachment action against Bush is "off the table" circumstances along with the forward movement of progressive grassroots movements could remove such a decision from her hands. Go back three decades to the Watergate period and you will observe that initially impeachment efforts were equated with Don Quixote efforts to assault windmills.
Many who had voted for Nixon's reelection less than two years earlier turned sharply against him after it became clear that he had trashed the Constitution and instituted his own version of an American dictatorship in flouting the law.
John Dean, former White House Counsel, whose damaging testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee marked the beginning of the end for Nixon, has stated that the excesses of the Cheney-Bush Administration represent conduct far more egregious than that of the one in which he served.
It was Dean who wrote that, once Americans learned that they had been deceived in the Cheney-Bush rush to war, highlighted by spurious claims that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction", then the nation would turn on its leaders and demand their removal.
As in the case of Watergate, there is so much information to be assimilated from so many directions that it takes awhile for John Q. Public to ultimately react.
Senator George McGovern, Nixon's 1972 election opponent, sought to make Watergate an issue, but without discernible success. It required more time for the public to assimilate and react to the invidious subterranean direction of the Nixon Administration.
It could be argued that the time element necessary to absorb all that is happening is even more pervasive now than three decades earlier for three reasons.
The first reason is that Americans are working more hours per week than in the seventies while most tread water economically.
The second reason is that, with the corporate media often either ignoring or soft pedaling hard news concerning the worst of the Cheney-Bush Administration's conduct, along with voices of the right being in greater abundance and encompassing more time per week than was the case in the seventies, it is more understandable that so many Americans have become confused over what is really happening.
The third reason, and the one that would make the ultimate difference in the case of a tumultuous citizen's response against Cheney and Bush, relates to the changing of the guard resulting from last Tuesday's voting. When the smoke cleared Democrats were in the majority in both houses of Congress, the Senate and the House.
Congressman John Conyers of Michigan now stands poised to emerge as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Under Republican leadership, with House Leader Tom DeLay conducting business without consulting the opposing party, which he sought to ignore, Conyers was compelled to hold investigative hearings in the White House basement. The autocratic DeLay-led Republicans denied him a committee room.
Conyers was undeterred. The result of his effort was a 350-page report entitled "Constitution in Crisis."
Armed with subpoena power and ensconced in a petition of authority, Conyers can launch investigative efforts in a way he could not previously. Operating as a chairman of an important committee he can now fully investigate charges that have heretofore been discussed without being investigated by Congress.
Senator Carl Levin, who stands to become Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had been repeatedly stonewalled by arrogant neocons such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
Levin will have the opportunity to open up the investigative process into charges of lawbreaking from the enhanced position of a powerful Senate committee chairman of the majority power, just as Conyers has that same opportunity in the House.
While Conyers holds the power and constitutional obligation to conduct investigations into executive wrongdoing as judiciary committee chairman relating to the Iraq War as well as possible constitutional violations of the civil liberties of Americans relative to the Patriot Act and sundry accompanying excesses, Congressman Henry Waxman of California figures to head the House Committee on Government Reform.
It was Waxman who had been repeatedly stonewalled in efforts to obtain information into the incestuous relationship between Vice President Cheney and Halliburton, the corporation he formerly headed as its CEO.
Waxman was particularly interested in investigating the secret meetings held in Cheney's office with Halliburton executives prior to rewarding profitable no bid contracts to the giant Texas corporation.
As Washington reporter Robert Parry has noted, an analysis by Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey revealed that these no bid contracts have contributed to the value of Cheney's Halliburton stock options rising by more than 3,000 percent. In 2005, Cheney's stock options increased in value from $241,498 to over $8 million.
"It is unseemly," Lautenberg exclaimed, "for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it."
There are numerous witnesses to call in thoroughly investigating the pattern of deception leading to war in Iraq along with the corporate cronyism that unjustly enriched a privileged few while U.S. service personnel died in a conflict launched in contravention of international laws. These are principles to which we were committed under Nuremberg and UN protocols.
This weekend an effort was launched to collect one million signatures urging the impeachment of Cheney and Bush. The grassroots movement was launched in a rally held, appropriately enough, on the steps of Constitution Hall in Philadelphia.
The speakers included Cindy Sheehan, former Member of Congress Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, and a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings against Nixon, and Democrats.com head Robert Fertik.
Once that profuse evidence revealing massive lawbreaking against Cheney and Bush is revealed the result could be the same as occurred in August of 1974. Seeing that the voters had reacted strongly against the Republican Party in special elections, where two safe seats in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cincinnati, Ohio fell to the Democrats, the Republican leadership reacted against Nixon.
The then Republican Party's elder statesman, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, visited the White House with the GOP's leaders in the Senate and House, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and John Rhodes of Arizona.
The Republican leaders stressed to Nixon that he had no support base, that he would be humbled in a Senate trial, and that he should resign for the good of the country. Nixon reluctantly accepted reality at that point.
A similar pattern could signal the end of the Cheney-Bush Administration without the need to conduct a House impeachment vote or Senate trial. After all, in 1974 a presidential election beckoned two years later.
The same dynamic applies as we approach 2007 with a presidential election looming even closer on the horizon than it had during that historic August of 1974 when the first president in U.S. history resigned.
KEYWORDS: Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Congressional Investigative Powers, 2006 Election Results, Impeachment of Cheney and Bush, Richard Nixon, George McGovern
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