It's called a "petard." Look it up.

The Republicans in DC and their enablers in the think tanks, Fox News Channel, and so on, have pretty much made the idea of bipartisanship a sad joke.

This much is not news. The ascendancy of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Class of 1994 took a scorched-earth approach to politics and law-making--marking the beginning of first the inseparability of the two, then their complete interchangeability. Democrats who believed that they could make compromises to get what they wanted were simply taken for a ride and dumped.

The Democrats have been a little slow in figuring all this out, of course. As late as the first week of August, 2006, Joe Lieberman still believed that his accommodationist record in the Senate was an asset for his re-election. Even progressive firebrand Russ Feingold has only recently been driven to abandon his long-held principled belief that the President has the right to expect Senate confirmation of his nominees, regardless of their qualifications and ideology.

The showpiece of the death of bipartisanship was the pursuit of impeachment grounds--any grounds--seriously, any grounds--for Bill Clinton, lasting most of the 1990s and costing the taxpayers millions. It got famously nowhere until, via the case of sad pawn Paula Jones, they contrived through a Supreme Court ruling to get the President under oath in a civil suit. At that point it was a simple matter to ask a notorious skirt-chaser about his philandering, and watch him either lie under oath or publicly admit his infidelities to a hungry pack of hypocritical sheet-sniffers.

As it turned out, the sheet-sniffers got a two-fer: First Clinton lied, then he came clean.

(Ironically, today we have a President, Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense who will do very little travel abroad after they leave office, joining Nobel Peace Laureate Henry "The Butcher of Cambodia" Kissinger in the select group of former US statesmen who risk getting bundled off to The Hague on war crimes indictments if they set foot outside the US--and yet there are still people out there who insist that Clinton's dalliances with a ditzy intern were the low point of the republic. But I digress.)

Some voices on the right--not many, but there have been some--have looked at the steamrolling tactics of the Republican leadership in Congress and at the naked power grab for the executive branch under the Bush administration with growing alarm. One would like to say their alarm was rooted in the high-minded realization that such tactics are fundamentally corrosive to basic constitutional principles and safeguards, but one would be wrong.

Their fear, instead, comes from the realization that all good things must some day come to an end, including even the Republican control of all three branches of the federal government--at which point the GOP-devised tools for putting the screws to the minority party will be there for the Democrats to use on them.

For example: The filibuster has served right-wing Republicans well at earlier times in American history, when they were in the minority. There might come a day when they'd regret not having it again. Brute-force redistricting is another cherished Republican tactic that might one day bite them in the ass. And so on.

But perhaps we won't have to wait for the reins of government to change hands to see that moment of payback arrive:

A lawyer plans to use a legal precedent that allowed President Bill Clinton to be sued while in office to force Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential adviser Karl Rove to testify in a lawsuit brought by former CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband.

California attorney Joseph Cotchett said he will ask a federal court to order Cheney, his ex-chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Rove to testify in depositions about their role in disclosing her classified status. […]

Cotchett, who took over as trial counsel in Plame's case on Tuesday, said legal precedent for whether Cheney and the others could claim legal immunity in the case comes, in part, from Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.

In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court said in a unanimous ruling that neither Clinton "or any other official has an immunity that extends beyond the scope of any action taken in an official capacity."

In order to be dismissed from the case or avoid testifying, Cotchett said, lawyers for Cheney and the other men would have to argue that they were acting on government business if they are found to have leaked Plame's name to the media.

Federal law makes it a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a covert agent.

Expect a fabulous amount of right-wing spin in the days and weeks to come, filled with jesuitical distinctions as to why Clinton being deposed under oath was good, but Cheney being deposed under oath would be bad. And remember that this isn't the same Supreme Court we had a decade ago; this one is much more predisposed to help the Bushies consolidate and enlarge their power relative to the other two branches of government.

Nevertheless, it's quite a thought: Dick Cheney in the booth, under oath. Lord only knows where that could lead.