I speak only for myself here and not for the Ron Shepston for Congress campaign.
People sometimes ask me how I think all of the present troubles will play out. I think that at noon on January 20, 2009, as the new Democratic President takes office, it may well look like Bush got away with everything, even at the cost of stampeding his party right off a cliff.
I think that at noon on January 20, 2010, it will be clear that he didn't succeed. I would like every person on whom the Bush Administration is now counting to help cover up its crimes to understand this very well.
One should be careful making predictions, etc., but I'm throwing caution to the wind here -- although not enough so to put money on any of this.
(1) Gonzales will resign in August, to be replaced by a recess appointment, sparing Bush the threat of hearings. (It might be Orrin Hatch, if he wants to play it safe.) Bush will pardon him for all crimes on the grounds that Congress is conducting a witch hunt and he wants to short-circuit it.
(2) Conyers will bring up inherent contempt against Miers and Bolten (and perhaps ultimately Taylor and Gonzales as well) but it won't pass the full house. They will instead hire someone to pursue it in district court, and it will disappear. This will appear to be craven, but will actually be part of some negotiation to rein in some planned excesses of Bushism. Some Executive Branch witnesses are produced and hearings limp along without discovering much. No one is impeached. Cheney may resign for "health reasons" he has chosen who he wants to be the GOP nominee so that that person can replace him as VP, but this turns out to be a bad strategy.
(3) Republican candidates are bound tightly to Bush by their opponents and many of them, including the Presidential nominee, suffer for it. Democrats win the Presidency and increase their margins in both houses of Congress.
(4) On the last day before the Thanksgiving recess, the House passes a Sense of the House resolution saying that any destruction of evidence or witness tampering in federal legislative investigations will be considered contumacious. The Senate passes a similar resolution after nine defeated or retiring Republican Senators agree to support cloture. (Lieberman will just have somehow re-entered the Democratic fold. Seeing a Republican candidate for President get only 36% of the vote can have a profound effect on anyone paying attention.)
(5) Before leaving office, Bush pardons everybody in his Administration, more or less, and everyone who cooperated in warrantless wiretapping or lying us into war, and every contractor who fought or profited in Iraq, and himself, for anything done since 2000. Coupled with the Supreme Court's ever-worsening standing rulings, and the destruction of RNC e-mails and other Presidential records, which Bush ordered on Christmas Day, on Inauguration Day it looks like everyone got away with every violation possible.
Then things get better.
(6) On Wednesday, January 21, 2009, subpoenas go out to all of the 2934 people who received Presidential pardons. They are to report, in person, to separate rooms in office buildings throughout Metro Washington at 8:30 a.m. on January 27, 2009, where House and Senate staff -- top lawyers pleased to work for a while for minimum wage -- will ask them a few questions under oath. Or maybe not so few. The subpoenas remind them that based on the Sense of Congress Resolutions, conferring with anyone else about their stories will be construed as witness tampering and subject them to contempt charges. Former President Bush and Former Vice-President Cheney, easily located by the Secret Service after the mysterious cancellation of an Air Force flight to Paraguay, are included.
(7) The following Tuesday, on what becomes known in history (and eventually celebrated as a national holiday) as Investigation Day, the witnesses are forced to go over, in detail, everything that they had done while in office. Armed with the best information available (and the help of not a few disgruntled ex-Bushie defectors), the staffers are able to ask especially probing questions, and of course no one knows what the person in the next room or across town is saying. The words "under penalty of perjury" are repeated often in every videotaped colloquy. The point that the witnesses have no 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, as a result of their pardons, has to be explained several times to the duller witnesses. The slogan that "we want truth and reconciliation, but reconciliation can only come after truth" is heard often. Some of the testimony continues into Wednesday. Bush's takes all week. Cheney's, into February. Some people refuse to cooperate; Congress exercises inherent contempt to put them into the DC Jail. Before long, they come out and coooperate after all.
(8) By Tuesday, February 24, a squadron of lawyers has processed all of the material contradictions between testimony of each witness and the others and/or the record. Subpoenas have gone out the previous week, and the witnesses are all brought in again. It turns out that there are a lot of serious contradictions. Congress offers use immunity against prosecution about lies told four weeks previously if people will tell the truth now. This, again, eliminates any 5th amendment privilege. The interviews take a bit longer. The rooms get pretty warm for February.
(9) Congress begins to leak videotape highlights of testimony. This is, after all, the people's business. Only areas where there are clear contradictions between someone's testimony and the demonstrable record -- it turns out that the smart Bushies kept CYA files of exculpatory evidence and never told Karl Rove -- are released. The point of these hearings, it is stressed, is not to get people to perjure themselves, but simply to find the truth of what happened during what is now generally known as "The Great Threat." (The words "to the Constitution" are understood as being implied.) Many point out that none of this would have been possible save for Bush's wholesale pardons.
(10) In early March, it turns out that the first indictment for perjury is filed. It turns out that a lot of people dropped a dime on Karl Rove. A lot of them kept evidence of what he had done. You can synch a Blackberry, you know. Some top lawyers step forward to defend him, but the defense fund turns out not to do all that well. People don't want to go on record as contributing.
(11) The process repeats, every four weeks. More and more contradictions are found. Some of those who fled after the first couple of rounds of hearings are extradited. There are international bounties, after all, paid with out of savings from the Gulf War. (It seems that we were able to get out pretty easily after the truth of how it all began came out and people didn't hate the current reform regime quite so much.) David Broder and Joe Klein claim that this was their real plan all along.
(12) Cheney is reported dead of a heart attack. His body is reported to have been cremated prior to an autopsy at the orders of a crying Lynn Cheney. 17 days later, both he and a still-living Ken Lay are discovered on an South Sea island and brought back forcibly to a federal prison to await hearings. Who knew they could put GPS in a pacemaker?
(13) Karl Rove flips. It's the only power he has left.
(14) By year's end, the truth about the Bush Administration is largely out. The public is boggled. Squads of volunteer schoolteachers work day and night to translate the story of how close the Constitution came to destruction -- and how members of the military refused orders to bomb Iran without cause, how foreign intelligence agencies had waited until it was safe to reveal information they had gathered about Bush Administration misdeeds, how the CIA thwarted a domestic plot by right-wingers to stage a false flag terrorist attack on Halloween night, and so on -- so that schoolchildren could learn it early and never forget.
(15) Attorney General Feingold becomes a national hero during the Great Perjury Prosection Parade and the presumptive 2016 Democratic nominee, seven years early. The Vice-President has no remaining political ambitions, after all; he's content to go back in seven years to serving the cause of defeating global warming -- the victorious cause, from the looks of the abrupt changes in public behavior and worldwide admiration for U.S. leadership on the issue -- and enjoy watching how all of his planning was working out. He had told himself that he wanted to be the "anti-Bush," he will smile ruefully, but he had turned into something better: the "anti-Cheney."
Like I said, I won't bet on every detail coming true. But I think that in 2009 we will take back the government, the Constitution, and that we will have truth before we have reconciliation. And everyone who might someday be called upon to tell the truth should prepare for that day now.
[UPDATE: As was noted in my original tip-jar comment, which was stripped during an error in publication, the model here is the "Truth and Reconciliation Commissions" that have taken place in South Africa and elsewhere to rectify grave and widespread insults to the rule of law. That link is worth clicking if you're not familiar with the concept.]