The full-scale partisan assault on President Clinton that began almost before his Inauguration was puzzling in that it always seemed to be a pre-ordained Impeachment looking for an impeachable offense. Whitewater? Yeah, let's try that. That didn't work? Ok, how about Troopergate? Nothing there? Well, let's throw accusations about drug-dealing at Mena, Arkansas at him and see if we can make that stick. No? Well, maybe we can pin the "murder" of Vince Foster on him. Yeah, that's the ticket!...

Like a pack of dogs in pursuit of elusive prey did these well-organized partisans keep at it, finally settling upon extraordinary persecution of a tawdry - but hardly impeachable - extra-marital sexual affair and its related lies as their last, best hope to declare that the Republic was sufficiently threatened by this democratically elected President to warrant his removal from Office. (I know! When you look back on it from the perspective of having experienced the Bush years, it seems pretty crazy, no?)

Upon the Supreme Court's appointment of Bush to the White House in 2000, Rove/Cheney & Co..certainly assumed power with considerably more swagger than either their "mandate" or the Constitution would've deemed appropriate. Without batting an eye, they immediately and continually stretched the limits of the Executive Office to extremes no legitimate Constitutionalist could ever have imagined, all with no apparent concern that there was any opposing force to truly limit their transgressions.

Unfortunately, they were right in acting as though theirs was the only game in town. These cynical pols seemingly understood that the public would be greatly disinclined to allow Congress to exercise its Impeachment Powers against two successive Presidents. To follow one Impeachment with another would understandably be construed as partisan warfare and would therefore be politically unpopular as a perceived misuse of the extraordinary Powers of Impeachment. These Powers, after all, were never intended to be exercised as a common feature of our governance.

Thus, having successfully pursued the Impeachment of Clinton and having inflicted great trauma to the nation during that time, it is therefore understandable that these pols would subsequently find the populace willing to grant a whole lot of latitude to crimes and misdemeanors rather than suffer such a stressful disruption of their government as they had most recently experienced in the Impeachment of Clinton..

This political response within the electorate to the trauma of the Clinton Impeachment is the only logical reason that I can find for Congress' unwillingness to exercise their most solemn duty to protect the Constitution during the years of the Bush Administration. There can be no other reason why we now find ourselves engaged in questions like "How much torture is TOO much torture?" or "How long can the President hold prisoners without granting Rights of Habeus Corpus" or for our "experts" to be struggling to find justification for our President's assertion that he has the authority to direct secret and warrantless wiretaps against anyone he deems appropriate.

In the past, each one of these transgressions and others such as we've seen perpetrated by these criminals would have raised considerable alarm and absolute opposition, including calls for Impeachment if the criminals persisted in their pursuit of such assaults on our Constitution.

But it is perhaps the greatest irony of the Clinton Impeachment that those who so wantonly attacked the Presidency during the course of that abominable exercise ultimately managed to destroy Congress' political authority - for the short term - to exercise their Constitutional powers of Impeachment.

My fear is that failure now to do whatever it takes to hold the Bush Administration accountable for their many crimes and misdemeanors will in fact not only take from us the specific rights in question that have been violated, but that inaction now will also perhaps fatally compromise Congress' Powers of Impeachment altogether.

Yet, we continue to hear the talking heads warning that there are political reasons why we should simply turn our head and let bygones be bygones. For myself, I would instead insist that we make certain we carry with us the Constitution before we pretend to move forward into any kind of change we can believe in.