Patience

For the moment, it seems, we wait.

We wait for indictments to come down in the Plame investigation, wondering just how high in the White House they'll reach. We wait for the once unimaginable sight of Tom DeLay fingerprinted after his arrest on charges of criminal conspiracy and money laundering this Friday. And we wait to see whether the rebellion within the GOP ranks, triggered by the bizarre Miers nomination, will blossom into full-blown civil war.

But as we wait, we should be thinking about what happens next. Scott Sheilds at MyDD thinks we're going to watch collapse of the coalition that's kept the GOP lock on the Senate and White House since 2000, and the House since 2002:

By the 2004 election, the Republican coalition was nearly at its breaking point. The Iraq War was dividing the nation and, as readers of The American Conservative can tell you, the Republican Party as well. The Bush administration's massive spending spree, enabled by their allies in Congress, left many fiscal conservatives shaking their heads. Scandals were beginning to peak their heads into mainstream consciousness. Unfortunately, the fear mongering of the administration was still enough to sway some moderates to Bush.

Almost immediately after the election, I sensed that things were about to change. The viability of the Republican coalition had bothered me for a long time. Could it really hold up? I was optimistic that it could not.

To the extent that I was wrong about anything there, it was the fact that the key Republican overreaches had already occurred -- fixing the intelligence on Iraq, DeLay's misdeeds in the redistricting of Texas, etc.

Over at Tapped, though, Matthew Yglesias is not nearly so upbeat. The GOP has rigged so much of the system, he writes, that even scandal, resignations, and calamitous poll numbers may not be enough to overcome them:

Thanks to gerrymandering, the Senate's natural malapportionment, and various forms of incumbent advantage it will be -- as the article acknowledges -- extremely difficult for the Democrats to recapture either house of Congress, even given a very favorable public-opinion terrain. Democrats could easily capture 54 percent of the vote and still leave the GOP with a majority of seats.

If, under the circumstances, Democrats make gains but the GOP retains control, the real moral of that story will be that the Republican stranglehold on power is essentially impregnable.

No such bet-hedging on the third scenario, though. With the distance that only writing from New Zealand can give, Bernard Weiner and Ernest Partridge lay out the news of the future; their headline says it all: GOP Swept from Power in 2006 - Impeachment Looms

(Associated Press, Nov. 8, 2006) The Democrats didn't waste any time after their landslide victory in Tuesday's midterm election that put them in charge, with huge margins in both the House and Senate.

The incoming Democratic chairs of the various investigatory committees announced that subpoenas would be going out immediately to the White House for all documents relating to when and how the decision to attack Iraq was made; to how far up the chain of command the authorization for torture went; and whether Bush and Cheney and/or their subordinates lied to the Congress and the American People. Congressional committees also will be on the lookout for evidence of Administration involvement in war crimes, bribery and election fraud, Democratic officials said.

It is expected that bills of impeachment will be filed shortly thereafter against both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

If either house of Congress ends up in Democratic hands after 2006, the most important single factor will, of course, be subpoena power.

The amazing thing about the investigations knocking on Cheney's door, DeLay's door, Frist's door, and all those other doors, is that they happened at all--since they were carried out in the absence of Congressional investigations--and, with a few exceptions, without aggressive pursuit by the establishment media.

Instead, they're the work of the few investigators at Justice and Treasury that the Bush administration hasn't managed to replace with ideologs or cronies--in those cases where their investigative unit in question couldn't simply be defunded out of existence. No meaningful Congressional oversight of any Bush administration schemes has ever--ever!--taken place. (Remember this moment?)

Say it with me: Subpoena power.