Showdown coming?
The American people are heading for a showdown with the Bush Administration over its mid-term firing of 8 federal prosecutors on spurious political grounds. As others have noted, that action was unprecedented and in no way comparable to the normal replacement of the other party's U.S. Attorneys done by Bill Clinton and every other President at the start of their administration.
While the Democrats are completely in the right to demand the testimony of the President's aides Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, she of the aborted Supreme Court nomination, the outcome is far from certain. Bush has vowed a court fight. Will his two appointees, Roberts and Alito, band together with the three remaining justices who made him President in 2000, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy, to thwart the efforts of Congress to investigate this potential obstruction of justice? If you think Watergate was a constitutional crisis, you ain't seen nothing yet.
I still don't think the Democrats can muster the votes for impeachment of Bush. Not yet, anyway, and not ever if it only brings Vice President Cheney into the Oval Office. If Cheney is indicted in the Plame affair and resigns, or succumbs to health problems, then all bets are off. Richard Nixon's impeachment became far more likely after Vice President Agnew resigned in disgrace and was replaced by the admirable Gerald Ford.
The thing to keep in mind is that Attorneygate is probably only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to White House horrors--another phrase from the Nixon impeachment. And don't you think Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is becoming more like his predecessor John Mitchell every day? All he lacks is his own Martha. And now everyone is talking about an "18-day gap" in the stream of e-mails the Justice Department turned over to Congress on the scandal. Shades of Nixon!